“Two Ways of Knowing Country”: Yolngu Artist Gaypalani Wanambi Wins $100,000 Telstra Art Award

A work that repurposes discarded roadwork signs to tell an ancestral story has won the nation’s most prestigious Indigenous art award – and earned its maker $100,000 in the process.

Gaypalani Wanambi’s Burwu Blossom was announced on Friday as the winner of the Telstra Art Award (the main prize) at the 2025 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (Natsiaa), in a ceremony at Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT).

The large-scale piece, nearly three metres in height, is made from salvaged street and roadwork signage found on Marrakulu Country. The signs form a metal “canvas” upon which the artist has used aerosol paint to tell the story of Wuyal. Known as the ancestral honey hunter of the Marrakulu clan, Wuyal founded the Marrakulu homeland in Gurka’wuy, after he cut down the ancestral Wanambi tree and caused a river of honey to flow.

“She has an amazing way of making those materials feel light,” Kate ten Buuren, Natsiaa guest curator for 2025, tells Broadsheet. “The work sort of hovers in the space and reflects light in this beautiful way, and the story shimmers on the surface. It’s almost like she’s brought together two ways of knowing Country: one way is about being told how to be on Country, and the other way is a deep knowing of who you are and where you come from.”

Of Yolngu Matha descent, Wanambi is from Yirrkala, near Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory’s north-east. She is the eldest daughter of the revered multimedia artist Wukun Wanambi, who passed in 2022. He also worked with found objects such as road signs. Burwu Blossom is both a homage to Gaypalani Wanambi’s late father and the blooming of her own practice.

“Honey is what I am working on,” said Wanambi, speaking in Yolngu Matha language, in a video statement broadcast at the awards. “This is what my father taught me to paint. Originally, we worked on the designs of our clan’s saltwater country, I used to help him with that. After that I began to paint the honey from the freshwater country. I showed those designs to [my father], this is when he told me, ‘Great! You will take this design now as your own, and you will paint this when I am no more’.”

Natsiaa also announced the winners across its six other categories, each of which is worth $15,000. The Telstra General Painting Award was won by Pitjantjatjara artist Iluwanti Ken, who’s based at the Amata community in remote South Australia, for his work Walawuru Tjurkpa (Eagle story). The Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award went to Kuninjku artist Owen Yalandja, based in Maningrida, NT, for Ngalkodjek Yawkyawk. Also based in Maningrida is Gurr-goni artist Lucy Yarawanga, who received the Telstra Bark Painting Award for Bawaliba & Ngalyod.

Two of the nation’s rising young Indigenous artists were also among the winners: Cape York-based Southern Kaantju/Umpila artist Naomi Hobson took out the Telstra Work on Paper Award for a photography piece called Present & Beyond; and Naarm-based multidisciplinary artist Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, of Pitta Pitta heritage, won the Telstra Multimedia Award for Pitta Pitta (Extracted) and Pitta Pitta (Google’s Gaze). The Telstra Emerging Artist Award was won by Sonia Gurrpulan Guyula, of the Djambarrpuyngu people of Arnhem Land, for her piece Mat.

Now in its 42nd year, Natsiaa attracted 216 entries, from which 71 finalists were selected. The finalists were ultimately judged by a panel of three: Stephen Gilchrist, Gail Mabo and Brian Martin.

Finalists’ works are on display at MGMT until January 26, 2026. It’s a vibrant showcase of the continuing innovation inherent in the nation’s Indigenous art community.

“It really is a celebration and an honouring of diversity of practice in First Nations artists today,” says ten Buuren. “It draws on beautiful connections and is a space where you can learn to understand the diversity between communities and the current threads coming from artists across the continent.”

www.magnt.net.au/2025-telstra-natsiaa
@mag_nt