Artist: Makinti Napanangka

Makinti Napanangka (c.1922 – 2011), Pintupi woman from the Western Desert, approached painting as an act of embodied memory. Working through impaired vision, then with restored sight, and finally with an aging hand, her canvases became tangible records of touch, memory, and devotion, proving that painting is not just about sight, but sensation itself.

Few artists have transformed adversity into aesthetic innovation as profoundly as Napanangka. Limited vision became tactile, her fingers and hands guiding paint across canvas in gestural tangles of desert-hued blues, purples, yellows, and oranges. Restored sight became luminous, delicate, light-filled works that elevated her to prominence among the rising stars of the Western Desert art movement. An ageing, trembling hand became kinetic energy, animated, interlaced lines that mirror the rhythmic movement of hairstring skirts swaying in ancestral ceremony.

Each phase of her late-stage career, from the mid-1990s to 2010, reshaped not only her own work but also our understanding of painting's potential. Her canvases radiate remarkable vitality and tenderness, achieved through rhythm and repetition rather than formal structure. They serve as records of a body engaging with Country, of ceremonial knowledge made tangible, and of an artist who refused to let physical limitations hinder her authoritative vision.