DEBRA NAKAMARRA

Debra Nakamarra (born in 1964)

Debra Nakamarra belongs to one of the great families of the Western Desert art. Born in 1964 in Papunya, in the Pintupi language, she saw, as a child, the birth of the desert painting movement. She is the eldest daughter of two major artists: Walangkura Napanangka (died in 2014) and Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula (died in 2016). She currently lives in Kintore, about 530 km west of Alice Springs.

She began to paint in 1984, with her sisters, under the guidance of her mother, who passed down the stories of the Dreaming Time. Today a recognized member of Papunya Tula Artists, she has inherited the right to represent her mother's stories related to the Ancestor Kutungka, as well as those of the distant Western Desert held by her father. She is married to the watercolorist Hilary Wirri.

Her paintings are inspired by the journeys of Kutungka Napanangka, an Old Woman of the Dreaming Time. She mixes traditional motifs and symbols that mark the places of her exploits. She mainly deals with the site of Tjintjintjin, a rocky waterhole and a cave located on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, about halfway between Kintore and Kiwirrkura.

According to the story, Kutungka knew that an ancestral snake () lived underground. She digs, finds it, kills it, and cooks it, then follows its path to the east to Muruntji. She also gathers edible berries, the (desert grapes), represented by the small circles. The lines and concentric circles evoke other elements of the landscape. Each canvas is both a map of the territory and a sacred story.

The bright colors, energy, and complexity of the motifs serve this story. Debra remains faithful to her mother's warm palette and adds other more unexpected hues.

Her works have been shown at numerous group exhibitions, including , dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Papunya Tula at Kluge-Ruhe (United States, 2021), and at Alice Springs (2018). In 2024, the exhibition , at Everywhen Art (Shoreham, Victoria), presented the paintings of Debra and her sister Katherine. It was their first joint exhibition organized by Papunya Tula Artists.