Title

NAPARULA, Marlee

Author

Author not identified

Source

[Not applicable]

Type

Biography

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Marlee Napurulu

Aboriginal artist Marlee Napurrula lives in Haasts Bluff, an Aboriginal community 230 kilometres west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. She was born in Irrimarti, a place west of Haasts Bluff in the early 1930s.

She works through the Ikuntji Women’s Centre which was ‘sung’ open in April 1993 when women from the nearby communities of Kintore, Mt Liebig and Papunya came to dance and sing with the Haasts Bluff women. Since then many activities have taken place in the centre. Painting has been the most popular. The artists of this area employ traditional symbols or inventive interpretation of their country, or a mixture of both. The people of Haasts Bluff are closely related to the people of Papunya, the Aboriginal community near Alice Springs where the contemporary Australian indigenous art movement first begun in the early 1970s.

Napurrula is the full sister of Gideon Tjupurrula and Coral Napurrula both artists who live in the same community. She had one daughter, Maureen Wheeler from her first marriage. Later she married artist Long Tom Tjapanangka at Haasts Bluff and had two children with him, Ena Napangatji and Freddie Fly Tjapangati.

Napurrula started painting at the end of 1993. She developed a distinctively individual painting style, experimenting with rich decorative colours, portraying bush flowers and nulla nullas, combining dots with solid areas of colour and line. Gradually her work became more and more simplified and refined, reflective of her country but unlike the work of her peers. In 1994 she was severely disabled during an operation and now paints with great difficulty. In 1999 she won the Alice Prize and was selected to appear in Beyond the Pale exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia and overseas.

Biography courtesy of The Australian Art Print Network, 2001.

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