Collection: Jacinta Numina Napanangka

Jacinta Numina Napanangka was born at Stirling Station, Central Australia in  1967 and is niece to the world 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 (Women`s) 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 was then appointed as a fulltime printmaker at Northern Editions, she currently works with the NT Government.

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

An Anmatyerre artist and one of six sisters and three brothers who lived at Ti Tree, 190km North of Alice Springs in Central Australia. Her mother is Barbara Mbitjana (Other names: Pananka or Price). She attended primary school at Stirling Station, a cattle station near Tennant Creek where she began painting at a young age, taking guidance from her world famous aunties Gloria and Kathleen Petyarre. She later studied at Yirara College in Alice Springs. Jacinta and her five sisters, Lanita, Selina, Caroline, Louise and Sharon Numina also well respected artists from Utopia, share many totems including the Bush Medicine Plant and she expresses their connection to the plant in a similar painting style to their famous Aunty, the renowned artist Gloria Petyarre. Jacinta first began painting the Women’s bush tucker dreamings when she was a young girl. Aboriginal women have their own ceremonies in which a series of song and dance cycles tell of the Ancestral Beings who walked the earth teaching women’s law and ceremony to isolated groups living throughout the desert. Each tribe has its own set of women ancestors with different stories, designs and dances, but most of the ceremonies have one theme common to all groups, that of food gathering as the most important part of women’s lives.

The Bush Medicine Leaves Dreaming knowledge story is a popular theme of the Numina Sisters. Many women from the Peytre, Mambitji and Numina family name hold custody of the story and knowledge keepers of painting series-themes such as Bush Medicine Leaves, Bush Tucker, Seeded, Soakage, Women' s Ceremony etc - in common with other skin groups across the vast arid creek beds and red sand of central Australia.

Subjects of importance in the theme-series painted are various bush tucker. Plant foods include wild berries, plums, onion, yam, seeds etc. Many animals can be depicted as food source or as totems such as Thorny Devil Lizard and Dingo Tracks in my country dreaming.

Women's Ceremony, Awelye Body Art Ceremony are mostly painted by senior ladies but younger women need to know it from a young age. Some themes such as Bush Tucker can be open and universal others can be secret and or significant cultural ceremonies.

Knowing, carrying and reinforcing these stories gives respect for Country and ancestors and shows responsibility and care of holding such stories to keep the stories and traditional practices alive. The knowledge must be retold repeatedly and handed on.

The Numina Sisters have all been taught to paint by their earlier elder painter grandmothers, mother-auntys, and cousin-sisters connected across the Central Desert region. Their mother's and grandmother's Country is in the bush and remote Stirling Station. Their father is from Utopia community side.