Gail Napangati b. 1970

Gail was born in Papunya, a remote community about 200km west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), and now lives with her husband and family in Amata, a small community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia. Gail’s painting style often reflects a fusion of the style of her birthplace in the Western Desert, with where she now resides in Amata.

Gail paints the Bush Onion Dreaming story that is associated with her ancestral country, and the journey of older women to gather the precious tucker. Gail's paintings capture the changing textures and undulating terrain of her grandmother's country, west of Papunya.  The lines are the tracks walked by the grandmothers to collect the bush onion, and the roundels represent either the waterholes around which the onion grows or where the onions have already been dugout from the land. The wild bush onion has been a prized food plant in the arid regions of Central Australia for tens of thousands of years. The bush onions are the small bulbs that grow in the soft, sandy soil in the banks of creek beds. It is a totemic plant, featured in song and ceremony, often relating to ‘women’s business’ as knowledge about the collection and preparation of the bush onion is traditionally passed down from older women to the younger generations. 

Gail says, "The ladies walk around looking for tucker and when they find a good place, they are sitting down and digging for that tucker."