Marrnyula Munungurr

Marrnyula Munungurr began working for the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre whilst Steve Fox was the art coodinator in the 1980s.  She still lives at Yirrkala to work at Buku-Larrngay Mulka as an artist and senior printmaker.  As well as being an arts-worker, she was brought up in one of the most artistically prolific camps in Yirrkala over this period.  Both her mother Nongirrna and her father Djutjadjutja (1935-1999) were constantly producing art with the help of their sons and daughters.  She grew to assist her father with his sacred Djapu paintings as well as developing her own style of narrative naive paintings. 

In 2009 she was featured in a major survey of contemporary art 'Making it New' at the MCA in Sydney. She was a participant in the Djalkiri project with John Wolseley nad Fiona Hall, which is still touring Australia.  In 2020 her work featuring painted representations of a flurry of small barks, but which was actually one large bark won the Bark Prize at the 2020 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

In this work Munungurr has created the cross-hatching grid pattern which is the sacred design for the freshwaters of the Djapu clan at the homeland Wandawuy, now an outstation about 150 kilometres south of Yirrkala and inland from Blue Mud Bay.  The grid refers to the landscape of Wandawuy - a network of billabongs surrounded by ridges and high banks.  Its structure also has reference at one level to woven fish traps.

Source: the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in 2021