DOROTHY NAPANGARDI | KARLANGU (DIGGING STICKS)

Commissioned by Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs, catalogue no. 6546 DN

The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

Dancing up country: the art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, exhibition catalogue, p. 29, pl. 17

Dorothy Napangardi ‘s Karlangu (‘Digging Sticks’) represents a key episode in two closely interrelated Warlpiri Jukurrpa (‘Dreamings’), the Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa (‘Women’s Dreaming’) and Karlangu (synonym ‘Kana’) Jukurrpa, Digging Stick Dreaming. The karlangu is an implement fashioned from mulga or dogwood. Digging sticks, ever-so-slightly curved, have sharp pointy ends used for digging yams or other food stuff and killing small reptiles. During Creation time these two Dreamings, instantiated into Napangardi’s country by Ancestral Women, remain strongly associated with women. At one level, Napangardi’s imagery references the multitude of beautiful, lithe, slim young Warlpiri women joyously dancing their way across mostly desert country. In this complex, densely meaningful, compressed visual narrative, the emergence of the digging sticks from beneath the earth, magically delivered into the hands of the young women, metaphorically represents not only the digging sticks but the dancers as well as the tall, thin-trunked Desert Oaks (kurrkapi; kurrkara (Allocasuarina  decaisneana), that grow in profusion in the sandhill and open spinifex country that these Ancestral women traversed during their epic cross-country voyaging.

Karlangu is one of Napangardi’s most beautifully-realised paintings, its sinuous grace and undulating quality identifiably that of the artist’s post-1996 monochrome artworks. Characterised by its complex composition, evoking a sense of shimmering movement, perhaps this leads the untutored to believe that it is an abstract work. But no, its historical antecedents differ substantially from those of western abstraction: Napangardi’s visual imagery has analogues in the external world. In this regard Napangardi’s Karlangu exemplifies her signature style, thus more accurately termed grounded abstraction.

* Karnta = women; -kurlangu is usually expressed as Karnta-kurlangu, meaning literally something along the lines of Women-owning/belonging

Dr. Christine Nicholls