COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Indigenous Australian artist Puuni Brown Nungarrayi (b. 1979), titled Kapi Tjukurrpa, on view 12 April – 18 May, 2024. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with COMA and is taking place at our Chippendale location on Gadigal land, 2/27-39 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, NSW, 2008.
Nungarrayi is of the Luritja language group and grew up watching her mother and prominent Western Desert artist, Isobel Gorey, paint. Reinventing and reimagining her mother’s Kapi Tjukurrpa (Water Dreaming), she has crafted a visual language distinctly her own, cultivating and nurturing one of the most significant art movements in Australian history.
Kapi Tjukurrpa (Water Dreaming) is a knowledge form passed down through generations, telling stories of water sources; a billabong, watering hole, stream or river – how to find them, replenish them and sustain them. Circular forms and motifs to represent these different forms of water have become a constant within Papunya painting, reoccurring again and again to emphasise the necessity and importance of water to sustain and nurture life amongst the dry red desert. In a broader sense the concentric circles allude, both directly and indirectly, to an all encompassing life cycle – everything is eternal.
The focus of Nungarrayi’s Kapi Tjukurrpa (Water Dreaming) is the heavy desert rains that fall during the summer across her grandmother and great grandmother’s country, Wantupunyu. In each painting the circular ripple is repeated three times, a small flower delicately placed at the core, referencing a different site in Nungarrayi’s ancestral lineage – Watulpuny, her grandmother and great grandmother’s country, Karringarra, her grandfather’s country, and Nullatju, her father’s country. Like viewing the cross section of a tree trunk, the intertwining, travelling and continuous rings are reflective of time passed and a multitude of histories.
Thoughtful and rhythmic brushwork move like a natural current or stream, extending and growing outward from within, carrying the eye with this pull. The concentric line work swells and pulsates, seeping into the cracks of the canvas, like the heavy summer rain that splits open the red earth, replenishing and regenerating the parched land.
Nungarrayi describes “The circles, swirling around and around and around is the lighting and the water moving, like a storm.” The eye of the storm, a delicate five petal flower, placed in the centre of each canvas three times, evokes imagery of the small flowers that bloom in plenty after heavy rainfall. These are then picked and crushed to make bush medicine – reminding us of the importance and necessity of water to sustain all life forms in Papunya.
