This painting features designs associated with the salt lake of Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). In the Tjukurrpa, a group of ancestral men known as the Tingarri ancestors visited this site on their travels eastward. They had previously visited a rockhole called Winparku, which is known for its soakage waters that are represented in the painting as concentric squares. The jagged lines represent the path of the Tingarri men as they travelled toward the salt-lake. This design is consistent with those used for rain-making ceremonies.

The subject of Nyilyari’s paintings are very close to those of his father, Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka, depicting the Tingarri ancestral narratives related to sites near Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay) and Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald). The Tingarri were a group of ancestral beings who travelled over vast stretches of the country during the Tjukurrpa, performing rituals and creating sacred sites. Like his father, Nyilyari Tjapangati tends towards dichromatic compositions, using either red or black to delineate his forms, before infilling the background with white. Unlike his father – and indeed, most of the painters at Papunya Tula – Nyilyari does not use dotting to infill the backgrounds. Rather, he covers the entire background, before scratching an echo of his figures into the surface of the paint using a stick or paintbrush. While this technique appears in the work of some older artists – notably Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula and Tjunkiya Napaltjarri – it is rarely as systematically applied as in Nyilyari’s paintings. The fading repetition of the principal motifs gives Nyilyari’s work a mirage-like pulse evocative of the shimmering desert heat. The effect is a throbbing visual “hum,” like the after-image of a blinding flash, as though Nyilyari’s designs were burnt upon your retina. This is a powerful metaphor for the residue of the ancestral travels: the spiritual energy of the Tjukurrpa that pulses through the landscape.