JULIE NANGALA ROBERTSON - NGAPA JUKURRPA (WATER DREAMING) - PIRLINYARNU
JULIE NANGALA ROBERTSON
NGAPA JUKURRPA (WATER DREAMING) - PIRLINYARNU, 2021
183 x 91 cm
acrylic on canvas
REGION
Yuendumu, NT
PROVENANCE
Warlukurlangu Artists, NT Cat No. 6266/21
Flinders Lane Gallery, Vic
Private collection, Qld
Art Leven, Gadigal NSWAccompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlukurlangu Artists
Signed verso: 'Julie' and bears cataloguing details verso
STORY
Julie Robertson Nangala, daughter of the celebrated artist Dorothy Napangardi and winner of the 2023 Telstra General Painting Award, here paints her father’s Country at Pirlinyanu—an area of rocky outcrops west of Yuendumu in the Tanami Desert. On a stark black ground, the composition shimmers with a delicate tracery of white dotting that evokes both topography and ancestral energy.
This site is a permanent water source and sacred kirda (Dreaming) place for Nangala/Nampiina women and Jangala/Jampijinpa men. The work depicts a powerful Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming) narrative in which two Jangala rainmaker ancestors sing the rain into being. Their storm collides with another from Wapurtali at the site of Mirawarri, carried westward by a kirrkarlanji (brown falcon, Falco berigora).
As the falcon struggles under the weight of the storm, it finally drops the water at Pirlinyanu, forming a vast maluri (claypan). A mulju (soakage) remains here to this day. Following rainfall, the site comes alive with ngapangaripa (bush ducks), a living echo of the ancestral event. Nangala’s painting captures the enduring spiritual and ecological vitality of this sacred landscape.
