Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) 1935-2013

One of the great visionaries of the Kintore region in the Northern Territory of Australia, Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa's (or Mrs Bennett) paintings were executed with the same cheerful spirit and vivacious enthusiasm that she exhibited in life. Born around 1935, Mrs Bennett was a pioneering figure in the development of the Haasts Bluff/Kintore Women's Painting Camp in 1994: a female-led painting co-operative and counterpart to the male-dominated Papunya Tula Artists Company. Like many Aboriginal artists of her generation, Mrs Bennet began painting in the closing decades of her life, in the mid 1990s.

The subject matter of Mrs Bennet’s paintings takes cues from her mother’s dreaming , which are connected to sites at Yumarra, Wantjunga and Tjalilli rockholes near Papunya. Her schematised depictions of the sand-dune country and surrounding rocky outcrops bare formal echoes to the designs used for body painting during the inma ceremonial dance. Twirling concentric marks and curving shapes ripple across the artist's canvases, energised with the dynamism of dance. 

Profoundly related to female ancestral iconography, her designs often depict women's ceremonies and rituals. The gathering of bush tucker such as kampurarrpa (desert raisin) and quandong (bush fruit) are also prevailing motifs- often denoted as abstracted symbols in blacks and pale yellows, set in relief against a red ochre ground. 

Mrs Bennet was named among the Top 50 of Australia's Most Collectable Artists in the  March 2001 issue of Australian Art Collector magazine. Having been exhibited widely across Australia, Singapore and Germany, Mrs Bennett's work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank and in corporate and private collections internationally. The artist died in 2013.