Few artists have found ease crossing between the strict truths of ancestral narratives and the expectations of a non-Indigenous audience. Doreen Reid Nakamarra, however, balanced the two worlds with pride and drew inspiration from the cultural divide. It propelled and shaped her practice, allowing her to become one of the leading painters to come out of the Western Desert.

Doreen was born in the desert east of the settlement of Warburton in Western Australia and moved to the community of Kiwirrkurra, where she married artist George Tjampu Tjapaltjarri. After a steady but modest start to painting where Doreen had watched and learned from her husband, her work reflected the dichromatic minimalism of his paintings. However, by 2003, Doreen had carved out a unique stylistic interpretation of the women’s sites of the Kana Puta with a particular focus on Marrapinti and Ngaminya. At these sites, the ancestral women made nose bones and ceremoniously pierced the nasal septa of the participating young women, and collected the desert raisin kampurarrpa (Solanum centrale). After George Tjampu’s passing in 2005, her husband’s gift of the ancestral narratives surrounding Kiwirrkurra grounded Doreen’s belonging within the community, and the Tingari Women’s journeys that she depicted.

Untitled – Ngaminya 2005 can be recognised as a breakthrough work for Doreen at this time. This work was exhibited in the highly anticipated Annual Pintupi Show at Papunya Tula Artists in Alice Springs in 2005, and propelled Doreen onto the scene, where she commanded attention as a refined and skilled artist. Developing a style that reverberated the subtle intricacies of the desert, Doreen evolved a sophisticated minimalism that saw her included in a stream of national and international exhibitions including the 2008 Sydney Biennale Revolutions: Forms that Turn, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Commissioned to create work especially for the Biennale, Doreen produced a mesmerising, large scale work which depicted the undulating sandhills surrounding Marrapinti in Western Australia. Her painting was unconventionally laid flat on a raised platform between the sound pieces of Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo and a sound installation by Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller. The painting drew the public to the epicentre of Pier 1, where it was exhibited, forming a crucial part of the holistic experience of voluminous waves and movement, journeys and revolutions.

In 2009, soon after returning from an exhibition in New York, Doreen fell ill with pneumonia and passed away suddenly. Her premature death sent shock waves through her community and the art circles that had embraced her. Doreen’s rising career was cut short and ended before she entered the profound realms of old age, where she would have no doubt produced paintings that fully realised the conceptual unveiling of the ancestral narratives.

Vanessa Merlino

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