Lorna Ward Napanangka / Women’s Ceremony (1A)

Lorna Ward Napanangka was born at Papunya in 1961, and is the daughter of famous artist Timmy Payungka Tjapangati.

Lorna is a second generation Papunya Tula painter that has been painting in her own right for a relatively short period of time. She and her husband, Billy Ward, now deceased, moved between the Pintupi communities of Kintore in the NT and Kiwirrkura in WA, spending most of their time at the latter.

Her fine and rhythmic work evokes styles as diverse as the severe Western Desert formalism of Anatjari Tjakamarra, the grid patterns of the Tiwi Islands and semi-geometrical Art Deco motifs. Lorna’s paintings are highly sort after by galleries and collectors worldwide.

Lorna’s artwork is associated with Women’s Ceremony and Law (Tingari cycle). She paints traditional designs depicting sacred women’s sites and women performing sacred women’s ceremonies in the rockhole and soakage water site of Marrapinti, to the west of the Pollock Hills in WA. In the dreamtime, a large group of senior women camped at this rockhole making the nose bones which are worn on ceremonial occasions. The Women later travelled east gathering edible Berries known as Kampuraarpa (Desert Raisin).