Walangkura Napanangka Biography

Walangkura Napanangka was born in 1946 at Tjiturulnga, west of Walungurru (Kintore) in the desert between the Northern Territory and Western Australia. She is one of the last generation to remember a childhood lived in the desert hunting and gathering with her family. Walangkura's family was amongst a group of Pintupi people who made their way out of the remote desert to the Ikuntji settlement (Haasts Bluff) in 1956. Relocated to the community of Kintore in 1981 when the outstation movement began Walangkura participated in the historic women’s collaborative painting project that was initiated by the older women as a means of re-affirming their own spiritual and ancestral roots. Within a year many of these female artists had begun painting for Papunya Tula which had established itself at the community. Walangkura's paintings portray the stories of her country and the location of specific sites in her traditional homeland west of the salt lake of Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). She lived at Kiwirrkurra with her husband and fellow artist Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula until her passing in 2014.