Bombatu Napangati

Ancestral Women at Ngaminya

2020

In this painting, Bombatu Napangati has painted a rockhole called Ngaminya which is southwest of Kiwirrkura. Surrounding the rockhole are puli (rocky outcrops) and tali (sandhills), depicted here as lines. In the Dreaming, a group of ancestral women camped at the rockhkole after traveling a far distance. While here, they gathered edible berries known as kampurarrpa (desert raisins). The berries are eaten right off the shrub or they are ground into a paste and rolled into a ball for preservation and later consumption. After this, the women traveled east, passing by another rockhole nearby, before turning north to Wilkinkarra.

Language Group: Pintupi
Date: Born 1955

Bombatu Napangati was born in the desert west of Kintore close to the present-day site of Kiwirrkurra. In 1964, when Bombatu was a young girl, she and her family were brought into Papunya by a Welfare Branch Patrol led by Jeremy Long. Bombatu married Lang Tjampitjinpa, with whom she had two sons. This marriage was part of an exchange between two artistic families in which her older brother Charlie Tjapangati married Nyumida Nampitjinpa, a sister of Lang. After Lang’s death, she married Papunya Tula Artist, Dini Campbell Tjampitjinpa, with whom she had four more children. Although Bombatu assisted Dini with dotting on his larger canvases, she did not paint independently until Dini’s death in 2000. Receiving instruction from her half-sister, Nanyuma Napangati, Bombatu works in a distinctive manner of the Kintore women painters.

Biographical information courtesy of Papunya Tula Artists.

BOMBATU NAPANGATI, Ancestral Women at Ngaminya, 2020

Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. 24 × 21 5/8 in. (61 × 55 cm). Commissioned by Richard Klingler and Jane Slatter for Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu | Past and Present Together.

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