Yinarupa Nangala paints abstract aerial views of the ‘Ngamurru’ in Kiwirrkurra, Western Australia, a meeting place for Aboriginal women. Predominantly painted in black, white, and red, her works are composed of dots, lines, and circles with particular attention paid to the spacing and rhythm of their distribution. These forms serve as symbols representing rock holes (water sources in the desert), seeds, ceremonial objects, and geographic locations; her paintings are at once topographic depictions of the landscape and recordings of the very rituals that are enacted there.

Yinarupa Nangala is the daughter of the late Anatjari Tjampitjinpa. She was also the wife of the late Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, a founding member of the Papunya Tula art movement. Along with her brother Ray James Tjangala, they both continue the contribution as artists as did their father. Yinarupa is a mother of 5 and currently resides in Alice Springs. She often visits her homelands near Jupiter Well in WA Yinarupa Nangala was a co-wife (with, amongst others, Ningura Napurrula, another Papunya Tula great) Yala Yala Gibbs. Thus, she is also related by marriage into George Ward Tjungurrayi’s and Willy Tjungurrayi’s families.

Yinarupa Nangalas contribution to Aboriginal art began in 1996 when she developed a distinctive style of weaving together her rich spiritual heritage as well as the physical environment of her homeland. Predominantly using black and white, Her paintings refer to the Dreaming path of a group of Tingari women who travelled through Mukula gathering bush foods. During ancestral times a large group of women came from the west and stopped at this site to perform the ceremonies associated with the area. The women, represented in the painting by the ‘U’ shapes, later continued their travels towards the east, passing through Ngaminya, Kiwirrkurra and Wirrulnga on their way to Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). As the women travelled, they gathered a variety of bush foods including kampurarrpa berries (desert raisin) from the small shrub Solanum centrale, and pura (bush tomato) from the plant Solanum chippendalei.
 The shapes in the painting represent the features of the country through which they travelled as well as the bush foods they gathered.

The sacred designs she paints have an intuitive sense of space and rhythm and are associated with the rockhole site of Mukula. These places are also sites with much food, and the women gather the seeds of the native Acacia. They collect the seeds and grind it into flour and eventually bake bread from this. Her paintings also commonly show Rockhole’s which are important water sources in the desert. Yinarupa’s unique art uses a combination of traditional and contemporary symbols providing an aerial view of the Pintupi area. This mixture ensures her work resonates with a contemporary audience of the traditional aspects of her culture. Her detailed rhythmic contemporary aboriginal art saw her win the prestigious ‘General Art Prize’ in 2009 at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, cementing her status as an acclaimed and talented artist.

Yinarupa received an honorable mention at the 2010, 36th Alice Art Prize – A National Contemporary Art Award.  She exhibited this year in Idaho, USA as part of an exhibition by Papunya Tula Artists, ‘Art of The Western Desert’. This collection of twenty-one paintings by senior and emerging artists from the remote desert communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura will be the first exhibit of its kind held in the famous resort town of the pacific northwest region of the USA.

She has become highly collectable and her paintings are both valuable and works of great beauty.

She has been voted one of the top 50 Aboriginal Artists. Her paintings include water holes, hills and the stony areas, as well as bush foods. The tree like shapes that run across her paintings are the trees used to make spears. This is Yinarupa’s unique representation of the story that Turkey Tolsen and his sister, Mitjili Napurulla, paint (both of whom are also family).