Debra Young Nakamarra / Women’s Ceremony (DY98)

Debra Young Nakamarra is a respected Pintupi artist and the eldest daughter of acclaimed Western Desert artists Walangkura Napanangka and Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula. Born at Papunya in 1964, Debra grew up during the formative years of the Western Desert painting movement before her family later moved west to Kintore (Walungurru), close to the Northern Territory and Western Australian border.

Art and cultural knowledge run strongly through Debra’s family. Her sisters Katherine Marshall Nakamarra and Lorraine Yungut Nakamarra are also artists, and Debra began painting in the mid-1980s, learning alongside her sisters under the guidance of their mother. Through Walangkura, the women inherited both cultural knowledge and the visual language through which the stories of their mother’s Country could be expressed in painting.

Central to Debra’s work are women’s ceremonial stories associated with her mother’s Country west of Kintore, including the important rockhole and cave site of Tjintjintjin. This Country is connected with the ancestral woman Kutungka Napanangka, whose journey across the Western Desert forms part of Pintupi Tjukurrpa and established significant places and ceremonial knowledge along the way. In 2024, Papunya Tula Artists noted that Debra and Katherine had inherited the rights to depict their mother’s stories associated with Kutungka and described both women as significant and highly regarded artists.

Debra’s paintings retain the strong graphic qualities of classical Pintupi painting while possessing an unmistakable character of their own. Concentric forms, curved and linear designs, enclosed shapes and densely applied dots create visual maps of Country, ceremony and ancestral journeys. While her work shares elements of the iconography seen in her mother’s paintings, Debra has developed a particularly bold approach to composition and colour. Bright blues, greens, ochres, reds, purples and whites can sit alongside more traditional desert palettes, giving individual paintings very different moods while maintaining a recognisable visual language.

Her compositions are often divided into a series of interconnected forms, almost like different places or episodes brought together within a single field. Heavy, rhythmic dotting gives the paintings movement and energy, while repeated roundels, sweeping forms and bands of colour create a sense of Country being travelled through, remembered and mapped.

Debra’s work has been exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. In 2024 she was a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, and that same year she and Katherine Marshall Nakamarra were featured in the two-person exhibition Tjintjintjin: Debra and Katherine Nakamarra, presented in association with Papunya Tula Artists. Her work is also represented in the permanent collection of the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts.

Selected Awards

• 2024 – Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Finalist

Selected Exhibitions

• 2026 – Aboriginal Art 2026, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne
• 2025 – Small Bites, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle
• 2024 – Community XV, Papunya Tula Artists, Utopia Art, Sydney
• 2024 – Tjintjintjin: Debra and Katherine Nakamarra, Everywhen Art, Flinders, Victoria, presented with Papunya Tula Artists
• 2023 – Papunya Tula Artists Community XIV, Utopia Art, Sydney
• 2023 – Little Gems, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle
• 2023 – Papunya Tula Women, Harvey Art Projects, Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
• 2022 – Fifty Years Papunya Tula Artists, Utopia Art, Sydney
• 2022 – Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu | Past & Present Together: 50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, USA
• 2021 – Director’s Cut: 2021, Harvey Art Projects, Ketchum, Idaho, USA
• 2021 – 50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists, Kate Owen Gallery, Sydney
• 2021 – papunya tula | fifty years, Harvey Art Projects, Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
• 2020 – 60 by 60 – Small Paintings, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle
• 2020 – Desert Stories, Paul Johnstone Gallery, Darwin
• 2019 – International Women’s Day, Kate Owen Gallery, Sydney
• 2019 – Defining Tradition: the first wave & its disciples, Kate Owen Gallery, Sydney
• 2018 – Papunya Tula Artists: Visual Rhythm II, Paul Johnstone Gallery, Darwin
• 2015 – Our Mother’s Dreaming: Katherine Marshall Nakamarra & Debra Young Nakamarra, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle

In her Women’s Ceremony paintings, Debra Young Nakamarra draws upon women’s cultural knowledge inherited through her mother, the acclaimed Pintupi artist Walangkura Napanangka. The paintings are connected to her mother’s Country west of Kintore and to important ceremonial places including Tjintjintjin, a rockhole and cave site associated with the ancestral woman Kutungka Napanangka.

During the Tjukurrpa, Kutungka travelled across vast areas of the Western Desert, passing through this Country and establishing important places along her journey. The stories associated with these travels have been maintained through generations in ceremony, song and cultural knowledge, and were passed from Walangkura to her daughters.

Debra translates this Country into a vibrant visual language of concentric forms, sweeping curves, linear bands, enclosed shapes and dense fields of dots. These motifs map significant features of Country and ceremony, including rockholes, important sites, sandhill Country and the routes connecting places across the landscape. Rather than presenting a literal map, the painting brings together Country, ancestral journey and ceremonial knowledge within a layered composition.

Although the story remains consistent across the series, Debra continually changes the arrangement and colour of these forms. Rich ochres and reds may be replaced by vivid blues, greens, purples, yellows or white, while familiar shapes are reorganised into entirely new compositions. The strong repeated dots create rhythm and movement across the canvas, giving each painting its own personality while continuing a cultural and artistic tradition passed from mother to daughter.