Alison Larry Nungurrayi / Yumari (19906)

Alison Larry Nungurrayi is a Luritja/Pintupi artist with strong family connections to the Western Desert art movement. She is the granddaughter of the highly respected artist Naata Nungurrayi, one of the most important painters to emerge from the desert art movement, and was able to learn by watching and working alongside senior women in her family, including Naata and Nancy Ross Nungurrayi.

Alison began painting in her own right around 2009, developing a distinctive style that carries the influence of her family while also showing her own confident approach to colour, movement and design. Her paintings often relate to important women’s sites, ceremonial knowledge and the ancestral stories of her Country.

Her works are known for their strong linear movement, bold colour and richly textured surfaces. Alison often applies generous layers of paint, giving her canvases a sense of depth and energy. While her work is grounded in traditional desert iconography, her use of colour gives many of her paintings a striking contemporary feel.

Through her paintings, Alison continues the cultural and artistic legacy of the senior Pintupi women before her, while creating works that are immediately recognisable as her own.

In this beautiful painting, Alison Larry Nungurrayi depicts Yumari, an important site west of Kintore in the Gibson Desert. Yumari is associated with powerful ancestral stories, including stories connected to love, ceremony, law and the travels of ancestral beings through Country.

The flowing bands of colour suggest the movement of the landscape, the paths through Country and the energy of the story held within this place. The rounded and concentric forms represent important features of the Yumari area, including rock holes and sacred places connected by travelling lines. These forms also reflect the way Country is understood from above, with each place linked through story, ceremony and ancestral law.

Alison’s use of warm yellows, soft pinks, ochres, creams and oranges gives the work a wonderful sense of light and movement. The painting feels both ancient and contemporary, carrying traditional desert symbolism while also showing Alison’s own bold and joyful use of colour.

This is a vibrant and highly engaging work, full of rhythm, texture and cultural depth.