Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan is a senior Yankunytjatjara artist from Indulkana on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia. With a career spanning more than twenty years of practice at Iwantja Arts, she is also a respected community leader and cultural liaison. Her paintings, grounded in ancestral knowledge, often depict Dreaming stories connected to her Country.

In 2020, Cullinan won the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, and in 2023, she was awarded the Hadley’s Art Prize for her painting Ngayuku Ngura (My Country), cementing her place as a leading voice in contemporary First Nations art.

This work is accompanied by a certificate from Iwantja Arts which states: “I am a Yankunytjatjara woman from Indulkana Community on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia. I’m an artist at Iwantja Arts, where I started painng over 20 years ago.

My painngs are of Tjukurpa (ancestral stories) and ngura (country) that have cultural significance for me and my family. They are a combination of landscape – specific locations and landmarks – and representations of the sky and stars. For Anangu the stars hold Tjukurpa (Ancestral cultural stories) just like the country – the rockholes, hills and creeks – have Tjukurpa. One main one is the Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) Tjukurpa where a specific constellation represents the sisters and the cheeky man chasing after them.

I’m proud to be an artist and a leader in my community, working to keep our culture strong and passing on important knowledge to the next generations.”

Cullinan has exhibited widely, including in Desert Mob (Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, 2016), Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2017), and Nganampa Ngura (Our Country) with her mother Emily Cullinan at Michael Reid Sydney (2024).