Kungka Kutjarra (Two Women/Hair String Ceremony) 2008

Makinti Napanangka made this acrylic painting on canvas, titled Kungka Kutjarra, sometime in her lifetime. Napanangka uses a limited palette of white and orange to create the painting’s concentric linear waves. In Aboriginal culture, paintings are grounded in knowledge and stories from the land, so in this case, the artist would have been intimately familiar with the subject that she was painting: the Kungka Kutjarra, or Hair String Ceremony. The painting is not an objective rendering of the ceremony, but an evocation of it, using the materiality of paint and the action of brushstrokes. The artist’s confident hand is visible in each careful stroke of orange and white. She builds up the image slowly, through the accumulation of material and gesture. We can see this approach as not only a way of translating the cultural knowledge, but also of activating its transmission through the painting. Ultimately, it's through the painting's physical presence that its full meaning emerges, reminding us that the artwork's materials, making, and context are all vital to its enduring cultural significance.