Kanpi, APY Lands

Cassyanne Woods is a young Pitjantjatjara artist from Kanpi in the APY Lands, painting the Two Sisters Dreaming in her grandmother's tradition. She is part of a continuing matriline of Kanpi women whose work carries the stories of their country across generations.

Her country

Cassyanne is from Kanpi, a small community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands - known as the APY Lands - in the far northwest of South Australia. The APY Lands cover more than 100,000 square kilometres of red desert country, sacred sites, and ancestral routes that connect Pitjantjatjara people to Tjukurpa - the foundational stories, law, and knowledge of country.

Kanpi sits within this country, surrounded by the landscapes that shape both daily life and the stories painted by its artists. The community is small, the painting tradition deep.

The Two Sisters Dreaming

The story Cassyanne paints is the Two Sisters Dreaming - the journey of two ancestral sisters travelling from Western Australia across to the Northern Territory. This Tjukurpa is shared across the Western Desert and is one of the most significant ancestral narratives in Pitjantjatjara and Anangu culture, connecting country, song, and ceremony across vast distances.

"My grandmother's story," Cassyanne says simply when asked what it means to her. "Like country side."

When she paints the Two Sisters, she feels closer to her grandmother. The story is not just inherited - it is lived through the act of painting it.

Her lineage

Cassyanne learned to paint at her grandmother's side. "I was watching and learning," she recalls of her childhood. As a young girl, she painted alongside her grandmother, watching the way the colours were laid down, the way the story emerged on canvas.

"She told me, when you grow up, you paint like my, like, similar."

That permission - and that expectation - has shaped Cassyanne's work. She paints in the tradition her grandmother passed to her, continuing a practice that connects her not only to one painter, but to a wider matriline of Kanpi women.

"Me, my mum, my aunties, and me. And my grandma. Same colour, same story."

This continuity - through colour, through story, through the women of one family painting the same country across generations - is the foundation of her work.

Her practice

Cassyanne's palette is consistent and deliberate. Greens, blues, and white. Light green, dark green, light blue, dark blue. "I always use that colour," she says. These are the colours of her country, the colours her grandmother used, the colours her family continues to paint with today.

The visual language of her work belongs to the broader Western Desert painting tradition - the layered marks, the rhythm of colour, the encoded country and story carried in each canvas. But within that tradition, her palette and her line are her own, learned directly from her grandmother and shared with her mother and aunties.

When she paints, she is doing what her family has always done. She paints because it makes her happy. She paints because the story continues through her.