Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri

Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri ( – 2008) was a Pintupi-Luritja-speaking Indigenous artist from Australia's Western Desert region, and sister of artist Molly Jugadai Napaltjarri. Daisy Jugadai lived and painted at Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory. There she played a significant role in the establishment of Ikuntji Women's Centre, where many artists of the region have worked.

Influenced by the Hermannsburg School, Jugadai's paintings reflect her Tjuukurrpa, the complex spiritual knowledge and relationships between her and her landscape. The paintings also reflect fine observation of the structures of the vegetation and environment. Jugadai's works were selected for exhibition at the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards five times between 1993 and 2001, and she was a section winner in 2000. Her paintings are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Life alt=Daytime landscape photo, showing a range of hills with the nearest rising to a rocky red peak, below a blue sky with a few white strings of cloud, and above the tops of eucalyptus trees. Daisy Jugadai was born circa 1955 at Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory, daughter of artists Narputta Nangala and Timmy Jugadai Tjungurrayi. The ambiguity around the year of birth is in part because Indigenous people operate using a different conception of time from non-Indigenous Australians, often estimating dates through comparisons with the occurrence of other events.

The people of Papunya and Haasts Bluff, such as Daisy, speak a variety of the Pintupi language referred to as Pintupi-Luritja, Thus "Daisy Jugadai" is the element of the artist's name that is specifically hers.

Jugadai's childhood was spent at both Haasts Bluff and a nearby camp, Five Mile, while she was schooled at Papunya. She married Kelly Multa, and they had a daughter, Agnes. They lived on an outstation, Kungkayunti, but Daisy moved back to Haasts Bluff when Kelly died. Daisy Jugadai had an older sister, artist Molly Jugadai Napaltjarri, and another sister, Ester, who predeceased her. This initiative, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly following the commencement of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983. By the 1980s and 1990s, such work was being exhibited internationally. The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists' company, had been men, and there was resistance amongst the Pintupi men of central Australia to women painting. However, many women in the communities wished to participate, and in the 1990s many began to create paintings. In the western desert communities such as Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale. She learned to draw during her schooling at Papunya and Haasts Bluff, but her first experience as a painter came working on backgrounds for the pictures created by her father. A complex concept, Tjukurrpa refers to the spiritual knowledge of the landscape and custodianship of it; it also refers to laws, rules or stories that people must maintain and re-produce in their communities. Daisy Jugadai portrayed in her art both those for which she had personal responsibility, and those of her late husband and late father. geographical locations that were the settings for these paintings included Muruntji waterhole and Talabarrdi, and other locations around Kungkayunti, where her family had lived for many years.

Career

Throughout the 1990s, Daisy Jugadai was a regular exhibitor at the Araluen Art Centre in Alice Springs, as well as other major exhibitions such as the Australian Heritage Art Awards in Canberra in 1994. The respect between the two women was mutual: Daisy was one of a group of artists whose work was selected for an exhibition that toured regional Australian public galleries in 1999–2000, Ikuntji tjuta – touring, which was curated by Marina Strocchi, the art centre coordinator who had first helped develop the Ikuntji centre in Haasts Bluff some years earlier.

Works by Daisy Jugadai are held by the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. as well as by Edith Cowan University. First exhibiting in the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 1993, Her work is also featured alongside other Indigenous artists such as Gloria Petyarre in the Melbourne international airport terminal, completed in 1996. Antiti, near Five Mile, a 1998 painting, has appeared as cover art on an issue of the Medical Journal of Australia.

Artist Mandy Martin, who participated in a 2005 collaboration with several painters from the Haasts Bluff region, thought that Daisy's rendering of bush tucker was achieved with a "stylised but dazzling personal language". Writer and critic Morag Fraser described Daisy's work as "extraordinary", observing that in Daisy's paintings "nature is so wholly internalised, and its rendering so uninhibited." A distinguished artist in her community, her death coincided with a vigorous renewal of artistic expression amongst her successors.