Pintupi People
Born c.1970, Lake Mackay, Australia
Lives and works in Kiwirrkura, Australia

Yukultji Napangati paints in a linear and optical style characteristic of Pintupi artists, creating vibrant, shimmering aerial landscapes that poetically convey lived and learned experience of place. Now based in Kiwirrkura and a member of the Papunya Tula co-operative, she began painting in 1996 following in the footsteps of senior women Pintupi artists such as Makinti Napanangka, Inuywa Nampitjinpa and Walangkura Napanangka. Napangati's recent paintings refer to seasons, significant sites, landscapes and ceremonies in the Western desert, using sinuous lines to describe sand hills and mushrooming shapes disrupting the dotted line composition to invoke the flowing water of the rain season. Napangati's story is particularly fascinating. From her birth until 1984 she had no contact with white people, living with eight members of her immediate family (the so-called 'lost tribe') in an area of country to the west of Lake Mackay, on the border between Western Australia and the Northern Territory.'