Imelda is the first child of Lucy Yukenbarri and Helicopter Tjungurrayi. In this painting, she depicts her mother’s country south of Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert called Winpurpurla, named after a tjurrnu (soakwater).

Winpurpurla is an inta (living water) place, so it always has good water. Imelda’s mother passed the story of three skin groups travelling to Winpurpurla to collect a variety of kumpupatja (bush tomato), which, when exposed to sun, change to the off-white colour and are ready to harvest. They also came to harvest bush raisins, represented by the orange dots. 1

Gugaman’s work is renowned for her merging of individual dots to create textural fields of colour. Surrounding this story of abundance in Winpurpurla, Gugaman offers a view of the undulations of sandhills, with sharp shifts in the line directions to the left of these indicating a change in land formation or vegetation.

1. Imelda Gugaman, Short St Gallery, https://www.shortstgallery.com.au/exhibitions/132/works/artworks-845765-imelda-yukenbarri-gugaman-winpurpurla-bushtucker-2022/