NYAPANYAPA YUNUPINGU

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s work is valued for the spontaneity and texture of her hand. She expresses her capacity to live in the moment, in the freeness of her mark making. There is no calculation in her renditions. Their final appearance is almost random. They are expressions of the movements of her hand, as they happen on that particular day. She is known for her dramatic departure from the previous conventions of Yolngu art. The ‘tense’ which the Yolngu sing/paint/discuss the creation forces that shape their world is largely unknown to outsiders. It conveys a temporal union between prehistory, the present and the distant future – simultaneously occurring time zones, in which the events happened/are happening/will happen. Until recently, all Yolngu art was either sacred in this tense or decorative. Decorative paintings were expressly ‘ordinary’ and without meaning or story of any kind. But once prompted to treat the story of her almost fatal goring by a Buffalo in the 1970s, Nyapanyapa threw these conventions over and unleashed a unique set of personal narrative paintings revolving around her own experiences.

Excerpt from: all our relations: 18th Biennale of Sydney, exhibition catalogue, 2012, p.303