kihi

This collaborative painting is an intimate portrait of the artists’ Country. It is also an encyclopaedia of Martu husbandry and ecological knowledge influenced by years of interaction with scientists and ongoing involvement in land management and cultural maintenance projects.

The painting provides a topographic replica of the landscape around Parnngurr — ranges, sand-hills and sand-plains, creeks, rock holes, claypans and soaks. The community of Parnngurr, where most of the artists live, is represented by a grid in the centre of the western section. Two rivers anchor the composition and orient the landforms. The Seven Sisters flit across the western side of the painting, pursued by Yurla.

Each artist paints from her own embodied knowledge, with her own style and
emphasis. The vivid parallel stripes painted by Kumpaya Girgirba represent tali (sand-hills), and the vegetation and fire patterns of sand-hill country. Ngalangka Nola Taylor and Ngamaru Bidu, influenced by the satellite imagery made familiar through years of working with scientists, paint a mosaic of multicoloured fire scars, representing the various stages of burning that indicate a healthy desert ecology. Central to this is the freshly burnt country,
nyurnma, charcoal-blackened or windswept orange, that provides ideal conditions for hunting parnajarrpa (sand goanna). Kanu Nancy Taylor incorporates a fine-grained diversity of vegetation that includes mulga
and coolibah trees, grasslands that attract seed-eating birds, and the nyukura stage of fire-induced growth that produces the staple warmula (bush tomato) and jinjiwirrily (bush raisin). The artists hold detailed knowledge of the plant species and their uses, when and where they grow, what eats them, whether fire encourages or kills them.

Food resources have long been an important subject in women’s painting,
but the variety of plants depicted in Hunting Ground, and the accuracy of
their location within the topography of the painted landscape, presents a unique hybrid of traditional painting, topographic and aerial mapping, and intimate physical knowledge of the Country.