Cecilia Yakiti

About Cecilia Yakiti

Cecilia is based with her family at Mutitjulu in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Cecilia started painting as a young child learning from school and many of her family group are painters. Her family has a strong involvement in looking after traditional country. Paintings like Cecelia’s are a way of continuing to celebrate and teach through the Tjukurpa. Kungkarangkalpa is the Tjukurpa of the Seven Sisters, concerning a group of women being pursued by a cunning man called Nyiru who attempts to lure them into marriage with him. He disguises himself in countless ways to trick the sisters, and is sometimes also invisible in paintings. In their escape the sisters travelled through a vast amount of Australia. They stopped to camp, build shelters and hunt for food, thus forming many features of the landscape and embedding the knowledge of survival in it. Eventually they fled into the sky where they became the constellation known as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. Nyiru still follows them ceaselessly across the night sky as one of the bright stars in the constellation of Orion.