Minyma Tingari (Women's Dreaming), 2000 by Barbara Napangarti Reid 122x198cm Cat 4978BR

Titled Minyma Tingari (Women’s Dreaming), this painting represents aspects of the secret and sacred Tingari Cycle, from the Tjukurrpa (Creation Era). It represents a spiritual amalgam that incorporates story, song and ceremony. It narrates the stories of the Tingari ancestors who travelled vast stretches of the country performing rituals, which in turn brought into being the land formations of particular sites. The site here is the artist’s custodian site, Tjukurla , in the Gibson Desert, Western Australia.

Barbara depicts the Tingari women gathered together for ceremony – represented by the U shapes – as they work within their country, gathering pintalypa or bush apples, and erecting wind breaks. The long shapes are the women's dancing boards. Before the ceremony the women paint up, they paint their breasts and their dancing boards with symbols that relate to the dreaming. During the ceremony the women hold the painted boards and dance with them. The long comb like arc shapes are their hair string belts used in ceremony.

All around them are the features of this landscape: puli or rock formations, represented here by the stratified, elongated U shapes: and tali – the waving horizontal lines depicting the sweeping sand dunes. This traditional method of representing geographic formations through the use of stratified lines also has its roots in the body paint worn by women during sacred ceremonies.

In her choice of colour Barbara beautifully captures the warmth of the Central Australian desert, whilst her use of closely woven lines broken with such textural use of paint evokes the shimmer of a hot summer’s day.