Biography

Alice Nampitjinpa is a senior Pintupi artist who has close ties to the Papunya Tula artists. Alice Nampitjinpa is the daughter of Uta Uta Tjangala, one of the significant forefathers of the Papunya Tula Painting movement, and friend to Geoffrey Bardon.

Whilst Alice’s early paintings reflect the style of the Papunya Tula artists often representing their stories with a field of dots and symbols she has since developed an individual expression of her dreamings.

Alice’s Tjukurrpa, or dreaming story is the porcupine or Tjilkamata. Her place of significance is Talaalpi, a waterhole near the West Australian border. She retells her stories with bold, colourful abstractions representing the sandhills and swamp lands of her country Her Ngurrapalangu paintings show the porcupine and waterways in bright colours. The colours yellow and red are important to Alice as they signify the colours of the ochres used in ceremonial body painting. The stories are often the tale of the porcupine searching for tucker or in turn being the source of bush tucker.
Alice is an active and successful hunter and relates keenly to her land and stories and takes great delight in telling her dreaming stories through paint