Sandhills, 2007 by Dorothy Napangardi 91x91cm

Sandhills (2007) by Dorothy Napangardi – A Timeless Depiction of Mina Mina

In Sandhills (2007), esteemed Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi captures the vast, undulating sandhills that extend endlessly across her ancestral Country. This sacred site, known as Mina Mina, is located near Lake Mackay in the Tanami Desert, north of Yuendumu, Northern Territory.

Mina Mina is a significant women's ceremonial site, featuring two vast soakage areas and an expanse of shifting sand dunes. It is here that Dorothy Napangardi and her Napanangka aunts performed sacred Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) rituals, passing on ancestral knowledge through song and dance.

Tjukurrpa and the Journey of Ancestral Women

During the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming era), ancestral women of the Napangardi and Napanangka kinship groups gathered at Mina Mina to collect ceremonial digging sticks (karlangu) that emerged from the earth. As they moved eastward towards Jankinyi, they performed sacred songs and dances, imprinting their journey onto the land.

Today, a majestic belt of Desert Oaks( Allocasuarina decaisneana ) stands where these digging sticks once surfaced, serving as a spiritual marker of this ancestral event.

The Movement of Sand and Spiritual Cartography

Napangardi’s distinctive dot work and monochromatic palette, in this painting filtered with ochre colours, beautifully convey the continuous motion of the desert sands, shaped by wind, time, and ancestral presence. This aerial perspective allows the viewer to experience the landscape both physically and spiritually, mapping the Dreaming tracks embedded in Warlpiri culture.