DORCAS TINAMAYI BENNETT - MOTHER'S STORY

DORCAS TINAMAYI BENNETT 
Mother's Story, 2024
acrylic on canvas
122 x 92 cm
 
PROVENANCE
Warakurna Artists, WA Cat no: 146-24
 
STORY
This painting reflects Dorcas Bennett’s deep connection to her mother’s Country, expressed through a red ground marked with cream and olive roundels representing rockholes, sandhills, women’s travelling lines and other key sites between Tjukurla and Warakurna. As noted by Warakurna Artists, “This painting is about Dorcas Bennett’s mother’s country… Dorcas reflects on her mother’s work and Country and her own connection to this part of the lands.”
 
Her mother, Nyurupayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett), was born near today’s Docker River community and spent her childhood at Pangkupirri, a series of rockholes deep in the Gibson Desert ranges. Growing up traditionally, she became a healer and a woman of significant ritual authority whose knowledge shaped the women’s painting movement of the 1990s. Dorcas’s canvas continues this lineage, using rhythmic roundels and desert colours to honour her mother’s legacy while re-energising the Tjukurrpa she is now responsible for carrying forward.