Doris Bush Nungarrayi 649-25

Doris Bush will have you to sit beside them. She may talk of marriage and her late husband Kumantjayi Tjangala , she may gesture the journey to Nyunmanu , an outstation nearer the WA border. There is a word “Tjkurrmananyi” meaning dreaming a dream and It is with mastery and elegance Doris navigates such a realm. Doris’s way contemplates memory, relationships, real experience, a sincerity for their culture and from there what manifests seems to be an infinite story. Within the artists fixation towards Nyumanu she has invented a pictorial language so confident and sophisticated it functions like gospel. This series is a romance, an introduction to a limitless body of work, a worship of connection, place , family and Papa Tjukurrpa. Doris weaves stories through her painting with imagery which represents stories from her life and the life of her family. Her mark making is flowing and instinctual, showing waterholes, root systems of trees and bush tucker, stories of goannas and snakes hunting each other and being hunted for tucker. Her stories depict Nyunmanu, a Dingo Dreaming site just to the south east of the remote Aboriginal community of Kintore in the Northern Territory. Most of the dingoes and their pups from this place rose up into the sky and became stars. However, the ancestral mother Dingo and her pup had gone out hunting and were too tired to rise up, so they turned into a large rock that marks the place of this sacred Dreaming. It is said that if you sleep in this place you will dream of the ancestral dingo puppies. The story goes that if you remove one of the gleaming stones found at Nyunmanu, the puppies will haunt your dreams until you return it to the place where it belongs. The custodians of this Tjukurrpa are Nungarrayi, Tjungarrayi, Napaltjarr