Bush Onionby Delores Furber Napaltjarri

Delores Furber Napaltjarri was born in 1958 at Santa Teresa Community; it is about 1 hours drive from Alice Springs in Central Australia. Santa Teresa or the aboriginal name, Ltyentye Apurte, was set up as a Catholic Mission in 1952, so Delores has always had a strong connection to not only her Aboriginal culture and beliefs but also to the Catholic religion. Delores began painting after being inspired by observing some of the women in the community, namely her cousin, Kathleen Wallace, who is a premier Keringke artist.

I (Sabine Haider, Director Central Art) have been working with Delores on and off since 2007. She paints a wide variety of Dreamtime stories including several bush foods such as bush banana, yam, and other fruits. She is also the custodian of ancestral spirit Dreamings. All of these dreaming stories have come from her father’s traditional land – the Eastern Arrente country. Central Art – Aboriginal Art Store has a good selection of her various styles of paintings and Dreamtime stories. Delores’s “Ancestral Spirit” paintings tell the story of the ancestral women who would travel around the country in search of bush tucker and water. The women would carry hand crafted hunting and gathering implements such as coolamon’s during their travels.

Delores’s other artworks share the stories of women hunting and gathering various bush foods which were important to collect whilst ripe. During the collection of foods the women would pay homage to the spirits of their ancestors. The bush onion is a regular feature in Delores’s paintings, and it is a significant dreaming and totem for Eastern Arrente people. The fruit can only be collected according to law by people who own this dreaming. Once the bush onion is ready to be gathered (once the top of the plant has died off during the winter) the women would skilfully and systemically dig by hand from one side to the other to remove it from the earth.

Traditional iconography and symbols are featured in all of Delores’s works and she mixes this ancient knowledge with bright colours which is captivating to see. She uses fine dotting techniques to illustrate her stories, which is common for Santa Teresa artists. Likewise, her black and white paintings, with the intricate details almost resemble lace work, blending the old with the new in contemporary pieces of art.

Delores is certainly a talented artist and her artworks appeal to a wide audience. Her works are very affordable and can come in small to medium sizes which appeal to a lot of art lovers for those small walls which just need a little something extra.

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