Jacinta Numina Napananka / Women’s Ceremony (JN102)

Jacinta Numina was born at Stirling Station, a cattle station near Tennant Creek, NT in 1967 and is niece to the acclaimed Petyarre sisters from Utopia. In the early eighties she started painting with a group of lady elders from the Utopia region. The central theme of her artwork relates to her knowledge of the Anmatyerre (Womens) Law and her country.

In 1996, Jacinta moved to Darwin to formally study art at Charles Darwin University and completed her Associate Degree in Art and Design in 2003. The next year saw Jacinta complete her traineeship in printmaking and she was then appointed as a fulltime printmaker at Northern Editions.

Jacinta paints mainly on canvas but she has also painted artefacts such as shields, coolamons and didgeridoos.

This painting depicts the various ceremonial sites (circles), the bush leaves, bush melons and the women’s ceremonial body paint designs. This dreaming tells the story of the sweet bush tucker that comes from a very small bush and is only found in Atnwengerrp. Once very abundant and fruiting in the summer it is now very hard to find. The women used to collect this fruit and scrape out the small seeds. They would then eat the fruit immediately or cut it into pieces and skewer them onto a piece of wood and dry them to be eaten in the coming months when bush tucker was scarce.

During the ceremonies the women will paint their bodies and breasts in various designs which represent the particular ceremony being performed.