Judith Nangala Crispin

Sydney, NSW, Australia

Judith Nangala Crispin is an award-winning poet, visual artist and conservationist, living on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country, and a member of FNAWN (First Nations Australia Writers Network). Judith holds a Ph.D in music and a Doctor of Arts in Poetry. She’s published two poetry collections ‘The Myrrh-Bearers’ and ‘The Lumen Seed’. Her recent verse novel, ‘The Dingo’s Noctuary’ was the winner of the 2026 Marion Halligan Award. Other recent prizes include the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry and the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize, and her poem ‘Voyage through the universe via Katherine’, included in NASA’s Lunar Codex, was deposited on the moon's surface in 2024.

ARTWORKS

Judith Nangala Crispin

Mothership of the fireflies (Installation, Photograph to follow)

In the garden of Namadji, a tree holds nine small birds in its arms, as they grieve for their friend beneath the earth

The Tree of Joyfulness erupts from the marrow of the First Rat. And its humming branches call the spirit rodents, those lost or returning to the source, and offers them shelter.

Ingrid, enormous in spirit form, visits the mountain one last time, before the night-breeze takes her

Three ceremony ladies, Molly, Rosie & Lily, return as ball lightning, in a thunderhead over Mt Hardy, on the rain dreaming songline, in Warlpiri Country

Off the South coast, where Christmas tourist traffic threads the Kings Highway, and stops for no reason, not for bird or fallen roo—the ocean gathers up Brendan, at the edge of water, remakes his shattered hind leg and broken tail, his heart...

At summer's end, night choirs of insects serenade the fire-blackened trees (after Rubens) Artist Print 1/2

Alfred, dragonfly king, harbinger of the sun, passes like a flame, singing, and the dead insect armies follow his hymns, up and out into the cold indifferent air

How often did we thrum our wings against your night windows? rasping our warning—that the rivers are dust, the orchards barren, that the insect tribes are leaving, that the earth is readying herself to let you go, as she has with so many before you.

The insects are leaving us

Now, while it's still dark, insect choirs offer their canticles to the dawn, and the new sun rises

Don't wait until it is required of you to become the Sun

All the winged things, appearing and disappearing through interdimensional doors—the miracle was always closer than we believed (after Malmström)

I dreamed of spiders—a great hierarchy of limbs and fangs, stretching from the earth into the sky, and thousands of tiny insects climbed them, skittering over those huge arachnid forms, up and up, until they too were lost in blinding light

Anima Mundi—the collective insect soul leaves the earth in search of new planets

Estelle

After the highway, the lights, the cool dark wind that moved him, Murat, somewhere in that gigantic night, discovered a door.

When Richard was ready, magpies sang at his hospital window until he remembered wings.

Untitled

Adam

When Richard was ready, magpies sang at his hospital window until he remembered wings.

Fred transforming from zebra finch to lightning, in winter stars, over North Black Range.

Jemima, in her new body, creates galaxies in the Boötes Void, near Corona Borealis

Her wing caught on a barbed wire fence, night becoming day and the bone pierced. Ruth slips off her owl body, exploding into the sky over Lake Burley Griffin, to become a sun

Ascending night-flyers

On a night of meteor showers and lit uranium mines, Jeremy, released from his chickenhawk body by a passing truck, unfolds his thousand-eyed wings.

Olive slips between worlds, in the company of river trees.

On a rainy afternoon, the Lorikeet of Transcendence.

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