A sign from the bush

In August, Arnhem Land artist Gaypalani Wanambi won one of the richest art prizes in Australia.

Story Kirsty McKenzie  Photo Benjamin Warlngundu Ellis

Gaypalani Wanambi is relaxed as she shows visitors her works at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre, in east Arnhem Land. The arts centre represents her and a host of other artists from Yirrkala and more than 20 other homelands. She demonstrates how she spray-paints metal panels, mostly upcycled road signs, then uses a power tool to etch her stories into each piece.

Gaypalani is clearly much happier at the art centre than she was the previous week at Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory (MAGNT), when she was thrust into the limelight as the winner of the 2025 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA). With $100,000 prize money, she’d just been awarded one of the richest art prizes in Australia and along with it, considerable media interest. More comfortable in her first language Yolŋu Matha, Gaypalani took questions with translation help from her sister, Dhukumul Wanambi, who works as an animator at the art centre.

“I’m happy and excited for my art,” Gaypalani says. “I wish our father had been alive to see me receive this award.” She explains that her father Wukun ‘Mr W’ Wanambi – a celebrated artist and one of the early members of the ‘Found’ group of artists, who use discarded and damaged metal road signs, car doors and even disused satellite dishes as their canvases – started passing on his skills to the then 17-year-old in 2003.

The eldest of six children, Gaypalani grew up with their home doubling as a studio. Works in progress were always around. She helped Mr W grind ochre pigments and gradually he taught her the painstaking process of painting the thousands of tiny saltwater fish that were his signature.

The NATSIAA prize is the latest in a string of accolades for Gaypalani, whose work is hung in the collections of MAGNT, Parliament House, Canberra, and Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. She was also included in the Art Gallery of NSW’s major 2025 exhibition Yolŋu Power. In 2024, she won the $35,000 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art prize, the highest-value professional art prize for women in Australia.