Women’s Ceremonies at Watanuma

Wintjiya Napaltjarri's work celebrates the ancestral stories of the Pintupi peoples that are handed down through oral and ritual tradition, stories that revolve the community's longstanding spiritual and physical relationship to the land. This piece consists of syntheic polymer painti applied to canvas with the handle of a brush. The iconography, informed the traditions of the Pintupi peoples and related to both bodily ornamentation and stone and wood carving, relates to stories of both the Minyma Kutjarra, female figures with magical abilities and an inextricable relationship with to the natural environment, as well as the claypan site of Watanuma, home to a species of flying ants of the same name whose emergence after heavy rains signify rebirth and whose fragility represents the precarity of life in harsh conditions.