Footprints: the art of Julie Nangala Robertson and Sabrina Nangala Robertson

Julie and Sabrina Nangala Robertson are sisters, living and
working in the remote Warlpiri community of Yuendumu in
the Central Australian Desert, northwest of Alice Springs.
They are amongst the most exciting artists of the current
generation of female Aboriginal painters.

Their work draws on the rich traditions of Warlpiri art, but
achieves a distinct and original idiom: clear, intricate, often
monochromatic.

The sisters share a rich artistic heritage as the daughters of the
renowned painter, Dorothy Napangardi (c.1953 - 2013), one
of the pioneering figures of the Aboriginal women’s painting
movement.

It was from sitting alongside their mother as she worked, that
they learnt both their cultural traditions and how to paint. And
this sense of continuity and family connection is enormously
important to their practice. Julie has described their pride in
following in their mother’s ‘footprints’.

But, while their own work shares in some ways the daring
innovations of Dorothy Napandardi’s highly distinctive
practice, Julie and Sabrina have forged their own, no less
distinctive and original, visual language.

The finely dotted skeins and grids of their art create shimming
pattens of light. And these intricate webs record the sisters’
familial lands and its origin-stories. Sabrina most often paints
her father’s country: the Ngapa Jukurrpa (Water Dreaming) at

the rocky outcrop of Pirlinyarnu, west f Yuendumu, a place
associated with rain and lightning narratives. Julie’s work
tends to focus on her mother’s birth site of Mina Mina – near
the salt-lake vastness of Lake Mckay, on the borders of
Western Australia. It is a profoundly important women’s site
where ancestral women transformed the landscape and danced
the world into being.

In 2023 Julie’s picture Mina Mina won the General Painting
prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Art Awards, in Darwin.

Footprints is their first exhibition outside Australia. Sabrina
Nangala Robertson will be present for the exhibition closing event.