Born: 1968, Kintore, Northern Territory
Language: Pintupi
Known as: Susan Gibson, Susan Napaltjarri Gibson, Susan Gibson Napaljarri
Dreamings: Tingari, Women's Ceremony, Wirrulnga
Susan Gibson Napaltjarri was born at Kintore, west of Alice Springs, into one of the most significant painting families of the Western Desert. Her mother was Ningura Napurrula, whose ceiling design for the Musée du quai Branly in Paris she considered the high point of her career. Her father was Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, one of the early men who took up painting for Papunya Tula. Her sister Glenys Gibson Napaltjarri also paints, and her cousin Barbara Napangarti Reid is a painter of long standing.
She learned by watching her parents work and by sitting with the women of her family while they painted. The country she paints is her own, and the stories are the ones held by the women of her father's and mother's side and passed to her in the ordinary way, through ceremony and through the years spent beside them at the canvas. She paints today for Papunya Tula Artists, the company owned and run by Western Desert people, alongside the independent work she sells through galleries.
Her hand is her own. Where her mother worked in a loose, open way with heavy black ground, Susan builds a firmer, more measured surface. She lays out her roundels and her long forms with an even rhythm across the canvas and fills the ground between them with close, careful dotting, often in a limited range of white, ochre and dark red. The result reads from above, the way this country is understood, as a map of sites and the tracks between them.
DREAMINGS
Wirrulnga - A rockhole in a small rocky outcrop east of Kiwirrkurra, in Western Australia. It is a birthing site, and the women of the Napaltjarri and Napurrula groups go there to give birth. Men are not permitted at the site. Women also spin hair string at Wirrulnga for the nyimparra, the hair string skirts worn in ceremony. As a Napaltjarri woman, this is Susan's own birthing country. In paintings of this site, the large concentric circles are the rockhole itself, the arcs of parallel lines are the sandhills around it, and the small clustered circles are kampurarrpa, the desert raisin, and pura, the bush tomato.
Women's Ceremony - The gatherings where women sing, dance and paint the designs of their country onto their own bodies. The marks carry knowledge of place, of food and water, and of the ancestors who made the country. Women pass this on to the next generation of daughters and granddaughters, and it remains women's business.
Tingari - The ancestral beings who travelled across the Western Desert in the creation time, making the waterholes, ranges and soakages as they went, and setting down the law the people still live by. Much of what the Tingari did is restricted and not spoken of publicly. What is shown in the painting is the shape of the journey and the sites along it.
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Susan paints for Papunya Tula Artists, and her recent work has been carried by galleries in Sydney and the Northern Territory. We have not been able to confirm a formal solo or group exhibition record, or a public collection holding, and we will not list one we cannot verify.
White, ochre and deep red, with a red border painted around the edge. Three large circles with lines radiating out from a small centre are placed through the canvas, surrounded by teardrop forms filled with dotting, long rounded forms with a red bar inside them, and rows of small roundels with red centres. The roundels are sites across the country Susan was born into, and the painting belongs to the women's ceremonies held on that country. The dotting is tight and even over the whole surface and it has taken a long time. This is the largest work by Susan we hold.
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.
This painting was purchased directly from Susan and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
