Mulyatingki Marney

AUSTRALIAN, MANYJILJARRA. c 1971

Senior artist Mulyatingki Marney is the sister of fellow artists Donald Moko, May Wokka Chapman and Nancy Nyanjilpayi Chapman. She was born at Nyinyari, near the Canning Stock Route. Her country encompasses the Punmu, Kunawarritji and Karlamilyi River regions.

Mulyatingki describes her pujiman [desert born, nomadic] childhood living and walking extensively through this area with her family as a young girl. Following the death of her parents, the sisters continued to travel in the desert alone, though at times they would meet and travel with other family groups.

When her family saw white people for the first time, they hid from them in a cave until nightfall. With the construction of the Canning Stock Route in 1910, they increasingly came into contact with European and Martu drovers travelling along the Route. Finally, following an extreme and prolonged drought, Mulyatingki’s family walked into Balfour Downs Station, where they were collected by mission staff and taken to Jigalong Mission. They were one of the last families to leave the desert.

In 1982, after living for many years at Jigalong Mission, Mulyatingki returned to her homelands with the Return to Country movement. Today, Mulyatingki continues to live in Punmu Community with her sister Nyanjilpayi Nancy Chapman.

As youngsters, Mulyatingki and her siblings drew sustenance from the tali [sandhills], warta [vegetation], and the many water sources of ngurra. It is these waterholes, hills, and bountiful hunting areas―known intimately through both real life experience and the recounting of jukurrpa [Dreamtime] narratives―that Mulyatingki depicts in her color-drenched aerial perspectives. 

Ranging from succulent raspberry hues through to the lavenders, ambers and rich saffron of the desert, Mulyatingki’s palette offers a glimpse of the chromatic drama of storm and sun slant on the topography of her Country. Centred in many of her paintings are the life giving and ancestrally significant waterholes and springs: sometimes a single, blue-rimmed sphere, other times a cluster of soot-filled ellipses. Around these water sources radiate patterns of drift and energy, the mark making stippled, fluid, or linear. Marks of an artist at the height of her powers. 

Now in her eighties, Mulyatingki lives between the remote Aboriginal community of Punmu and the coastal Pilbara town of Port Hedland. The breadth and virtuosity of her artistic output distinguishes her as a seminal member of a tradition of painting that emerged from the Western Deserts in the early 2000s. This is a largely (though not exclusively) matriarchal tradition, led by strong women whose knowledge and example has helped to anchor and inform a highly respected movement of contemporary Aboriginal art, and continues to guide the practice of emerging generations of Martu artists. While she often paints at the Spinifex Hill Studio, Mulyatingki is also a founding member of Martumili Artists, a collective which since the mid-2000s has supported the art practices of the traditional custodians of the Great Sandy, Little Sandy and Gibson Deserts as well as the Karlamilyi area: regions that collectively span thousands upon thousands of remote square miles. 

Spinifex Hill Artists