Yolngu woman Dhambit Munungurr was born to paint.
Both her parents and grandfathers were renowned artists from northeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and Ms Munungurr inherited their love of painting.
“I started when I was about three, watching my parents,” she said.
Over the four days of the Garma festival, held at Gulkala, Ms Munungurr created a bush studio, where she painted, and gallery.
Garma is the annual celebration of Yolngu life and culture held in remote northeast Arnhem Land, hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation.
The festival showcases traditional miny’tji (art), manikay (song), bunggul (dance) and story-telling, including politics, and is an important meeting point for the clans and families of the region.
As visitors walked from the bunggul (ceremonial dance) grounds they could see dozens of Ms Munungurr’s works hanging on trees and propped up on the red dirt.
It’s about as far from the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in inner city Sydney as you can get - and that’s where Ms Munungurr is heading for her next solo exhibition in September.
A prolific creator, Ms Munungurr has previously had solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne and her work has been chosen as a finalist in the Wynne Prize and the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
She often paints on bark, but Ms Munungurr created her works on board at Garma.
“These are freshwater stories,” she said.
She uses a combination of traditional and contemporary techniques, colours and stories, including a bright cobalt blue on bark.
In 2007, Ms Munungurr was struck by a car, causing serious injuries.
She uses a wheelchair and has restrictions on movement and speech as a result.
Ms Munungurr introduced non-traditional colours to her work when she started mixing ochre with acrylic paint in an effort to overcome the difficulty of grinding ochre by hand.
But she’s not defined by the accident. Ms Munungurr tells her stories her way through her art.
“I’m still painting,” she said.
