NATSIAA 2025: Gaypalani Waṉambi wins $100,000 at National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards
Gaypalani Waṉambi has won the top prize at the NATSIAAs. She thinks her late father, Mr Waṉambi, would be proud. (Supplied: MAGNT/Charlie Bliss)
Gaypalani Waṉambi, a Yolŋu artist from Northeast Arnhem Land, has taken out the $100,000 top prize at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs), the longest-running and most prestigious award for Indigenous artists.
Waṉambi won the Telstra Art Award with her almost 3-metre x 3-metre etched metal work, titled Burwu, blossom, created on discarded road signs.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.
Waṉambi's sister Dhukumul told ABC Radio National's Awaye! that the win was exciting, but bittersweet.
"It's emotional, because our father is not here to see her go up on the stage and see her win," says Dhukumul, who is also an artist.
Featured as a finalist in the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award at the NATSIAAs, Waṉambi follows in the footsteps of her artist father, the late Mr Waṉambi, who twice won that category, in 2010 and 2018.
Waṉambi started out as an artist in 2003, at the age of about 17, working with her father, who had made their home into a studio. She would assist him with tasks such as grinding ochre pigments, which he would then apply to a large pole or bark.
"Our father taught me how to paint our saltwater estates at Gurka'wuy when I was young," she says.
"After this I began to paint honey stories from our Marrakulu clan freshwater estates. He saw this and was encouraging me: [He said] 'I give you authority to paint these designs. You can carry this on when I am gone. You will hold these patterns and stand on them.'"
Waṉambi herself is a two-time NATSIAA finalist, first appearing in the exhibition in 2023; and she recently featured in the exhibition Miwatj Yolŋu — Sunrise People at Bundanon Art Museum in regional NSW.
Last year, she won Australia's richest art prize for female artists, the Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize, worth $35,000. Her work is also currently on display — alongside her father's — at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, as part of the exhibition Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala.
She plans to spend the NATSIAA prize money on cars for herself and her family, so they can travel more easily to Country.
"We want to go out to our Country and stay there," Dhukumul says.
"[With] this money, we can go out bush together."
Waṉambi's art often depicts the life-cycles of bees, honey and stringybark blossom. (Supplied: MAGNT/Charlie Bliss)
Waṉambi is one of seven winners, from 71 finalists and 216 entries, at this year's NATSIAAs, including $15,000 awards for general painting, work on paper, bark painting and more.
Finding materials on Country
Country is fundamental to Waṉambi's art practice.
In her award-winning artwork, Burwu, blossom, she tells a story of the honey hunter Wuyal, an Ancestor of the Marrakulu clan.
Looking for somewhere for the Marrakulu people to live, Wuyal travelled from Nilipitji to Gurka'wuy, where he cut down a Waṉambi tree, causing a river of honey to flow and establishing the people's homeland.
But Country is more than the source of the stories and symbols in Waṉambi's work; it's also where she finds her materials.
As a Yolŋu artist, she is bound by cultural practice to use mediums sourced from the land in her art. As one of the foremost women in the "Found" movement — which her father was also part of — she etches her designs into discarded materials, like the road signs used in Burwu, blossom.
After she collected the signs in Eastern Arnhem Land, Waṉambi painted one side in black aerosol paint, before drilling patterns representing bees, her totem, and etching stringybark flowers into the metal. The intricacy of her designs mirrors her father's richly detailed work.
"If you go visit [my Country], you could see the stringybark tree's blossoms, and maybe it'll tell you that the honey is ready," Dhukumul says.
"It's actually a season teller for most of the things in Arnhem Land; what's in the land and what's in the sea."
The NATSIAA judges — academic and curator Stephen Gilchrist, artist Gail Mabo, and academic and artist Brian Martin — praised Burwu, blossom as "shimmer[ing] with exquisitely rendered designs that are deeply anchored to Yolŋu philosophies".
A family connection
Waṉambi's father taught her how to be an artist, but she's not the only NATSIAA winner with family connections. Bulanjdjan Lucy Yarawanga, who won the award for Bark Painting, is culturally a grandmother to Owen Yalandja, who won the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award.
Yalandja was told the story of the yawkyawk spirits by his father, the artist Crusoe Kuningbal. (Supplied: MAGNT/Charlie Bliss)
Yalandja, a Kuninjku artist, spent a year crafting his award-winning wooden sculpture, Ngalkodjek Yawkyawk, of a mimih or yawkyawk, a mermaid-like figure. Like Waṉambi, he learned carving from his father.
He was praised by the judges as "an artist at the height of their powers … By utilising new materials and techniques to retell an ancient story, Yalandja's work plays a vital role in maintaining, safeguarding and invigorating cultural practices".
In her award-winning black-and-white bark painting, Bawáliba & Ngalyod, Yarawanga, a Gurr-goni artist, depicted Ngalyod, a Rainbow Serpent, surrounded by various-sized spirit figures, the Bawáliba, who protect the Gurr-goni people.
"I don't think of myself as a perfect woman or artist, no. I'm just painting. Sometimes, I save money for my grandkids," Yarawanga said. (Supplied: MAGNT/Charlie Bliss)
The judges praised Yarawanga as an "intuitive, confident and uninhibited artist".
Yarawanga was excited to win, but remains humble about her practice, which includes works on bark, textiles and paper.
"I'm not a proud woman or something like that, but I know how to paint," she says. "Sometimes I tell stories; sometimes not."
The story in Bawáliba & Ngalyod is one told to her by her mother, who died in 2019.
The artist recalls her mother first started telling her about the spirits and the Rainbow Serpent when she was eight or nine years old and making a lot of noise with her brother.
"[The stories] belong to my mum," she says. "It's her Dreaming, so I've learned from her."
The Bawáliba are mischievous, she says. For instance, they would, while the family were sleeping, seem to make the sound of a car or turn on a light: "But it's not a car; it's not a light."
Yarawanga hopes Yalandja is not her only family member who follows her into making art.
When she makes art, she says, "I bring my granddaughter to teach her how [to paint], so if I pass [away], then she might take it up."
Fathers and daughters
Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, a Pitta Pitta artist who won the Multimedia Award at the NATSIAAs, was inspired to be an artist by her father, sculptor Glenn Romanis.
"I'm always thinking about where technologies come from, where they originate, their purpose and their function," Romanis says. (Supplied: MAGNT/Charlie Bliss)
"[He] inspired me to take this path, and showed me that it was possible," Romanis says. "And my mum and I always go to Country together … I definitely wouldn't be here if it wasn't for my family.
"Dad's practice is so incredible. When you're a kid, you don't really appreciate it; it was just kind of Dad's job.
"But as I got older, I really have been able to recognise the amount of work that he's put into his practice and the way that he's been able to raise a family as an artist."
Winning the Multimedia Award — for her framed light-box prints — was "overwhelming [and] surreal".
The judges described her work as using "unsettling stillness [to] .. highlight Google's glitches and pixelations to reveal its technological limits and its stark contrast with Indigenous conceptualisations of Country".
Romanis started using Google Earth in her practice in 2020.
"I couldn't travel to Country to make images, so I became interested in the fusion of Western systems of cartography and photography technologies and what happens when those two things come together," she says.
She's particularly fascinated by the way photography and technology shape how we understand the world around us.
"I like to think of Google Earth as an archive of Country," she says.
"It makes sense that First Peoples are engaging with these technologies. We're adaptive and we're innovative. … [And] my practice is really a vehicle for connecting to Country and to Ancestors, and it's a real privilege to do that."
NATSIAA curator, Taungurung artist Kate ten Buuren, describes "all of the different ways that people connect and express their relationship to the places that they belong" as one of the themes of this year's exhibition.
Romanis is especially proud to be a part of a NATSIAA exhibition that boasts a majority of female finalists and winners.
"It really speaks back to the matriarchs of our communities," she says.
"I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for my mum.
"I think ultimately Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have such important practices and such important stories to share, and what an honour it is to be in such good company."
The NATSIAA exhibition runs until January 26 at Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, Darwin.