Aboriginal artist Marlee Napurrula lives in Haasts Bluff, an Aboriginal community 230 kilometres west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. She was born in Irrimarti, a place west of Haasts Bluff in the early 1930′s. She works through the Ikuntji Women’s Centre which was ‘sung’ open in April 1993 when women from the nearby communities of Kintore, Mt Liebig and Papunya came to dance and sing with the Haasts Bluff women. Since then many activities have taken place in the centre. Painting has been the most popular. The artists of this area employ traditional symbols or inventive interpretation of their country, or a mixture of both. The people of Haasts Bluff are closely related to the people of Papunya, the Aboriginal community near Alice Springs where the contemporary Australian indigenous art movement first begun in the early 1970′s.
