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.

At Amata, Gail paints with Tjala Arts, the community's own Aboriginal-owned art centre, established by the women of Amata in 1997 as Minymaku Arts and today one of the powerhouse studios of the APY Lands. Her place on the Tjala roster puts her in the daily company of some of the region's most celebrated painters, and locates her practice within the collective working culture — senior women and emerging artists painting side by side — that has made Amata's art so distinctive. It is a fitting setting for an artist whose life bridges two great painting regions: born at Papunya, where the Western Desert movement began, and painting now in the community whose women built one of its most vibrant successors.

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 dug out 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.

That double inheritance is visible on the canvas. Gail works in a palette of bright reds, oranges, yellows and whites — the saturated warmth associated with Amata painting — applied in neat, close, glossy dotting that speaks of her Papunya origins, where precision of mark-making has been prized since the movement's first years. The discipline of the technique and the heat of the colour give her Bush Onion paintings their particular character: iconography from her grandmother's Country, carried south and repainted in the light of the APY Lands.

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."