Mother’s Story

Dorcas Tinamayi Bennett

29 November - 13 December

Presented in collaboration with Warakurna Art Centre

Across the red-dune country between Tjukurla and Warakurna, stories move through families like breath. They are held, carried and renewed through generations, paintings shaped by what is seen and what is inherited. Mother’s Story honours the legacy of Dorcas Bennett’s mother, the revered painter and senior law woman Nyurupayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett), while affirming Dorcas’s own custodianship of the Tjukurrpa she carries forward. Born in the bush at Wurturu rockhole near Docker River, Dorcas’s early life unfolded through constant movement across Country, walking into Warburton Mission, then to Warakurna, Tjukurla, Amata and Areyonga, and the trauma of fleeing Maralinga fallout. These journeys shaped her memory and her art, culminating in the establishment of the Warakurna art centre in 2005, where she began painting and now serves as Chairperson.

Her mother, Nyurupayia Nampitjinpa, grew up traditionally at Pangkupirri and lived without contact with white people until her teens. A healer and a woman of formidable ritual authority, she became one of the great painters of the Western Desert, her powerful canvases rooted in rockholes, sandhills and women’s law. Her works sit in the nation’s most important public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, NGV, AGNSW, AGSA and QAGOMA. The paintings in Mother’s Story extend this lineage. Dorcas paints the rockholes, sandhills, women’s journeys and water sources between Tjukurla, Yumarra and Warakurna, stories she holds as cultural obligation as much as artistic subject. As the final custodian of these narratives, her canvases re-energise her mother’s Tjukurrpa with urgency and devotion. Together they form a portrait of matrilineal resilience, celebrating the women who carried knowledge through displacement, mission life, nuclear fallout and cultural disruption, ensuring it lives on through painting, family and Country.