Christine Campbell Nangala, Aboriginal Artist

Christine Campbell Nangala is a Pintupi artist from Kiwirrkurra, a small community in the Gibson Desert of Western Australia. Christine is the daughter of the famous painter, Bambatu Napangardi, and her sister, Theresa Campbell Nangala, is also a talented artist.

Christine was born in 1973 into a family with painting on both sides. Her late father, Dinni Campbell Tjampitjinpa, painted for Papunya Tula Artists, the company at the very origin of the Western Desert movement — and the family's story traces the movement's own arc. In the early years of desert painting it was the men who held the brush, with the women assisting; it was only later that Bambatu emerged as a successful artist in her own right, and it was she who passed the techniques of acrylic on canvas and linen to her daughters. Christine has painted collaborative canvases with her mother, just as Theresa does, making the Campbell family practice a living continuation of a tradition that began at Papunya more than fifty years ago. In Christine's early years the family moved to Kintore, in her ancestral Pintupi homelands on the Northern Territory side of the Western Australian border, part of the movement of Pintupi families returning to Country that also established Kiwirrkurra.

Christine is a strong painter, using bold linework and contrasting dots characteristic of the Western Desert painting movement to depict designs associated with the Tingari Dreaming, or Tingari Song Cycle. The Pintupi people believe that the Tingari ancestors travelled vast expanses of the then-featureless desert and created everything - including land, flora and fauna, sacred sites and law. Due to the deeply sacred nature of the Tingari Dreaming, much is kept secret from the general public, restricted to those possessing the appropriate levels of initiation and seniority.

While the Tingari designs are Christine's signature, her repertoire reaches across the features of her Country: she also paints Water Dreaming works and canvases depicting tali — the parallel sandhills that ripple across the Gibson Desert — along with waterholes, bush tucker and the sites associated with women's ceremony. Where the Tingari canvases carry the restrained authority of restricted knowledge, these other works show the breadth of what she inherits through Bambatu: the mapped, lived geography of Pintupi Country in the hands of a second-generation painter.