Doreen Reid Nakamarra

See Deborah Clark and Susan Jenkins eds, Culture Warriors: Australian Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, pp. 132-133, for discussion and illustration of related works by Nakamarra.

In the cited catalogue, Paul Sweeney, then long term Manager of Papunya Tula Artists writes, "Nakamarra is a quiet achiever who has been gradually honing her skills over the last decade. Currently she is leading a group of relatively young women painters from Kiwirrkurra who have continued to explore intricate line work and subtle colour shifts. Her combination of fine brushwork and precise technique has ensured that even her smallest works are highly detailed. On the larger formats, her current style of finely drawn zigzags combined with broken lines of alternate coloured dotting creates an optical effect in which the canvas appears to rise and fall like a series of meandering ridges and valleys. These are tali, or sandhills, which surround all the major women's sites at Kiwirrkurra that Doreen refers to in her work. Doreen has expanded on the theme and recently has introduced an even more subtle use of colour, using two or sometimes three slight tonal variations, and combining them with the complex, wavering line work that has become synonymous with her signature pieces.

Nakamarra's exhibition history peaked last year (2006) when she was represented in twelve shows, including Right here/ right now at the National Gallery of Australia, the Melbourne Art Fair and Pintupi at Hamiltons Gallery in London. Her paintings have an appeal that attracts the viewer from a purely contemporary perspective, and have succeeded in introducing new audiences to Western Desert art." (ibid.) 

However, her star continued to rise way beyond this early peak. In 2007, her work was included in Culture Warriors at the National Gallery of Australia, which toured to the nation’s major public institutions before travelling to the Katzen Arts Centre in Washington in 2009. In 2008, she was the recipient of the General Painting Award at the 25th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. And in 2009 she was selected for The Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia, and exhibited at the Nganana Tjungurrayi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja: We are Here Sharing our Dreaming, East Galleries, New York, USA, where her large scale painting was acquired by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Tragically after returning from the exhibition in New York the artist fell ill and died shortly after, at the peak of her career.

This painting is sold with accompanying Papunya Tula Artist's documentation that reads in part, "This painting depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Marrapinti, west of the Pollack Hills in Western Australia. The lines in the painting depict the creek at the site and the sandhills that surround it. In ancestral times a group of women of the Nangala and Napangati kinship sub sections camped at this site during their travels towards the east. While at the site the women made nose bones, also known as marrapinti, which are worn through a hole made in the nose web. During ceremonies relating to marrapinti the older women pierced the nasal septums of the younger women who were participating in ceremony. Nose bones were used by both men and women but are now only inserted by the older generation on ceremonial occasions."