I don’t have other responsibilities at this stage in my life. Now it’s about the work. In my own way this is what I have to say. Grass is a barometer of climate change and if I can get people to look at grass anew there is the bonus.
Yvonne Mills-Stanley, 2007 1

While I’m doing my paintings I always have my family in mind. I have my country in mind. A few years ago we went back to Mina Mina to see my country. We’re going back soon, for more singing, dancing, painting up, making our Jukurrpa. Mina Mina my country.
Dorothy Napangardi, 2002 11

Many women enter their creative prime well after they have borne and raised their children and otherwise fulfilled responsibilities to family or community. Consider Elizabeth Jolley, Rosalie Gascoigne, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Feminist arguments have focussed on the disadvantage to women of childbearing, with less attention to the advantages for mature women who channel their life experience into achieving significant goals when they are able.

The pairing of Dorothy Napangardi and Yvonne Mills-Stanley, both women over fifty, is an artful demonstration of two who have experienced success as mature women. In this sense their stories are similar. Both found their aesthetic voice late, having discharged their other responsibilities and finding that they could spend time and energy exploring creative reserves built over decades.

Mills-Stanley has been painting since the 1960s. Her technical skills and aesthetic instincts were well developed when her subject matter underwent a dramatic change in 2003, following a trip west of Cunnamulla in Queensland. Coming home to the comparatively lush environment in which she lives at Mt Glorious outside Brisbane, she was confronted by the contrast between drought-stricken western Queensland, where it was too dry to grow grass at all, and the long green kikuyu (pasture) grass in her own area. She began an investigation of grass that fired her creative energy and which continues to dominate her imagination and output. “It’s all I paint now, not a particular grass or paddock, but more the spirit of grass.”

It is this work which has garnered Mills-Stanley’s critical recognition in recent years and seen her awarded prizes (Warwick 2004, Noosa 2004, Flying Arts Regional Award 2006). Her grass works read at a distance as landscape of sorts, but use the sculptural elements of wind in grass to develop organic shapes with compelling atmospherics. These works are inspired by the long paddock, an historic Australia-wide web of tracks, trails and grass verges by the highways, still used by graziers to feed cattle, particularly in times of drought.

More recently, Bailed Up Following the Big Wet (from the ‘long paddock’), shows grass that has escaped, washed out by big rains, out of the imposed order, onto fences or distributed in clumps over the ground. These works recreate grass in spooky, hooded, faceless shapes - grass given vigour and personified like other escapees. These works suggest the limitations of human manipulation, a lesson also writ large on the broader landscape of experience now that the dimensions of climate change have
also impacted on the city.

The final group represented in this exhibition, the contrived and precarious balance of stacked hay bales in the Baled Up series (from the fenced ‘back paddock’), allude further to human manipulation and Mills-Stanley’s interest in the environmental ethics of climate change. These works create an optical vibration on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, with up to 23 layers of paint creating a depth of colour and interest in each image.

Napangardi began painting only after her children became independent and well after she moved from her traditional Warlpiri lands into Alice Springs. She began with colourful representations of the bush banana dreaming. However, in 1999, following a visit to her ancestral lands, her work became significantly more refined in both motif and palette. Its subject matter and style also shifted dramatically. It was with this seemingly minimal style of dot painting she won the 18th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2001. Its innovative and unusual qualities have earned for her the reputation as one of the most important indigenous painters working today.

Napangardi’s connection with country is subject and inspiration for her paintings which depict her Jukurrpa dreaming. Titled for these touchstone motifs (for example Salt on Mina Mina or Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa) these mature works have monochromatic backgrounds traced with a contrasting colour (white on black, or grey on white) in meandering intersecting lines or ladderlike grids. Influenced perhaps by the footmarks in the dirt created by lines of dancing women, they engage the eye in a lively dance. The large salt lake in the Warlpiri region is also depicted in Napangardi’s work. Ngayurru (Lake Mackay) is mostly dry, with a surface of cracks or traced white lines. Paintings like Salt explore the fissured radiating cracks in the crystalline surfaces transformed by her own aesthetic.

Napangardi has the ability to sustain visual tension across the entire surface of the canvas, giving her works an arresting quality. Her marks are evocative - of music, dance, harmony, the sight and sound of water. Each of these are an intrinsic part of Napangardi’s dreaming, which includes the story of the women from Mina Mina who were travelling eastward with their digging sticks, dancing all the way. The Walpiri Snake Ancestor, Walyankarna, was travelling north. At a certain point they met and for a while the snake ancestor watched them in the dance without revealing himself. Their dance was enthusiastic and energetic, such that the dust billowed and rose, eventually elevating the Ancestral Snake and bearing him away to Yaturlu Yaturlu (the Granites), where a small rock waterhole never dries out.

“Country in Mind” is a prescient pairing. It draws together two senior women, one indigenous, one white, both focussed on their own environment but bringing into these abstracted representations associated metaphysical, symbolic and literal ideas. The dimensions of Napangardi’s dreamings encompass moral mores and metaphysical concepts which are not explicitly described but are there nonetheless. Similarly Mills-Stanley’s life experience, observation of country and world view captures an environmental ethic with an aesthetic able to extend the collective imagination. This exhibition and its selection of mature works from both artists honours the strength and creativity which may have been unexpressed, dormant, but nonetheless developing to be unleashed in these women’s different but strongly felt representations of their own ‘country in mind’.

Louise Martin-Chew September 2007

1 Conversation with the author, 2007
11 Dancing Up Country: The Art of Dorothy Napangardi, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002: p.11