LILY KELLY NAPANGARDI - Tali

DOB: c1948. Haasts Bluff (Ikuntji), Northern Territory
Known as: Lily Kelly Napangardi, Lilly Kelly Napangardi, Lily Kelly Napangarti
Dreamings: Tali (Sand Hills), Kunajarrayi (Women's Dreaming)
Language: Luritja
Community: Mt Liebig (Watiyawanu), Northern Territory

Lily Kelly Napangardi was born around 1948 at Haasts Bluff, and the country around Haasts Bluff is hers. She was still a young girl when her family came in to the newly established settlement of Papunya in the early 1960s, and Papunya is where she first came to paint, working alongside her husband Norman Kelly Tjampitjinpa on his canvases through the years when the Western Desert painting movement was finding its feet.

In the early 1980s Lily and her family moved west to Mt Liebig, known as Watiyawanu, and it was there she began painting in her own right, working for Papunya Tula Artists from the mid 1980s. Everything people recognise in her work now took shape at Mt Liebig.

Her Dreamings

Tali (Sand Hills) — Tali are the long sand dunes running through her country between Mt Liebig, Haasts Bluff and out towards Kintore. This is ancient country and it has never once held still. Wind lifts the sand and lays it down somewhere else, rain cuts fine channels down the face of a dune, rockholes fill and go dry again, and ranges surface out of the haze before the drifting sand takes them back. Like many desert artists Lily paints it from above, the whole sweep of country laid open at once, so you are looking down on ridge after ridge running away to the horizon. She works with almost no colour, mostly fine white dotting over black, the dots shifting in size and density until the surface lifts and hollows and moves under your eye. It is a landscape that will not sit still long enough to be pinned down, and that is exactly what she is painting.

Kunajarrayi (Women's Dreaming) — Lily is a senior Law woman of Watiyawanu and the custodian of the Women's Dreaming associated with Kunajarrayi, a site in the country reaching between Mt Liebig, Haasts Bluff, Kintore and Coniston. She holds the songs, the dance and the ceremony that belong to it, and has spent many years teaching them to the younger women of her community. That authority is what sits underneath the paintings.

Awards

1986: Northern Territory Art Award for Excellence in Aboriginal Painting
2003: Finalist, 20th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award
2006: Named one of Australia's 50 Most Collectable Artists by Australian Art Collector magazine

Exhibitions and collections

Lily's work has been shown at the Desert Mob exhibition in Alice Springs and in the Telstra Award exhibition in Darwin, and she has held a solo exhibition of recent works from Mt Liebig in Sydney. Her painting Sandhills, a 180cm square canvas from 2002, was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales through the Mollie Gowing Acquisition Fund for Contemporary Aboriginal Art in 2003. She is also represented in the Araluen collection of Western Desert paintings in Alice Springs, and her work is held in private and corporate collections in Australia and overseas.

Being an aerial depiction, this painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.

This painting was purchased directly from Lily and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.