HER MEDITATIONS - BIDDY TIMMS NAPANANGKA

Biddy Timms Napanangka

Her Meditations

3 - 24 August 2024

Biddy Timms Napanangka has been a working artist for almost 20 years, during which her practice has steadily evolved. You would be hard-pressed to recognise the finely detailed brushwork of an early Timms Napanangka if you were only familiar with her later work. Yet, below the surface, you can find traces of the path leading to the artist she is today.*

Warlpiri painting practice as a whole is usually presented as a rhythmic, meditative process involving singing and dancing; swift and fine dot-work spreads over the canvas as the artist traces her sacred Songline across stretches of the Tanami Desert. The art from Lajamanu - as opposed to Yuendumu, the larger of the two Warlpiri townships - is known predominantly for featuring loose, gestural paintings. Many of the artists, however, including Biddy Timms Napanangka, began their careers in the finely-dotted and in some ways more rigid traditions of Warlpiri art-making.

Napanangka is a quiet, humble woman.  She rarely asks for anything [beyond] a quiet, temperate place to paint and think.** Louisa Erglis, former and interim Manager, Warnayaka Arts

At this stage in her career, Napanangka has turned to a more inward form of meditation as she paints. After laying down a thick surface of fresh acrylic paint, she holds her brush so that the tip meets the canvas aiming away from her, bristles agains the grain. Observing her at work invokes the meditative raking of sand in a Japanese Zen garden. Loaded with a new colour, her brush drives across the surface, as though unearthing the new colour from underneath the base layer.

Introduction

In June of 2023, we conducted a weeklong painting project at Warnayaka Arts In Lajamanu for country x Country, a joint exhibition between ——- Simon Napanangka and Sydney-based painter Neil Tomkins. During this time, we slept on wire-framed trundle beds in the art centre studio, surrounded by thousands of paintings, framed, unframed, rolled, strained, stacked, or suspended from clip-on trouser-hangers on clothing racks.

It was in this chaotic and beautiful context that we fell in love with the humble minimalist paintings of Biddy Timms Napanangka. The artist herself is the perfect embodiment of the peaceful, calm works she creates. That week, the studio was abuzz with laughter, conversation, frequent family visitors - constant hustle and bustle. Every day of the workshop Biddy was first one in, approaching the art centre with her walker the exact moment the doors swung open to begin the day.

Neil Tomkins, the painter accompanying us on this trip, describes part of his process as “pushing paint around”. The phrase applies just as well to Napanangka’s painting practice. Going through the video footage afterwards, Biddy is remarkably still, hardly moving save for her brush-hand, in a seemingly deep state of meditation. All of the paintings in this exhibition were either discovered or painted during our time in Lajamanu.