Esther Bruno Nangala, Aboriginal Artist

Esther Bruno Nangala is the granddaughter of Naata Nungurrayi, a legend of the Western Desert art movement. Esther was born in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in 1981, and grew up in Christmas Creek in Western Australia, near Fitzroy Crossing, and later in Walungurru (Kintore).

Esther's path into painting was a long and deliberate one. Schooled at Yirara College in Alice Springs in both Pintupi and English — where she also received her first art instruction — she returned to Walungurru in 1999 and began painting under a genuine apprenticeship, working for years alongside her grandmother Naata and Naata's skin sister, the artist Nancy Ross Nungurrayi. In the same period she took part in cultural work of lasting value, helping translate Pintupi songs into English. She painted first within community collaboratives, and only in 2009 began working fully in her own right — a decade-long grounding that shows in the assurance of her mature work. Her family's artistic depth extends further still: Naata's brother is the celebrated Pintupi painter George Tjungurrayi, and in December 2024 Esther's work was selected for Papunya Tula Artists: Community XV at Utopia Art Sydney, the co-operative's annual survey of its newest generation — the year after her sister, Bronwyn Marshall Nangala, appeared in the same series.

Esther represents an exciting view into the future of Western Desert art. Esther's works are vibrant and often textured with heavy paint application. Esther takes a great deal of pride in her painting, always looking for new ways to visually express her culture through colour and form. Esther is a self-critical painter and a master of colour, and in 2022, her paintings were exhibited in the prestigious Art Paris art fair. She has also painted and donated significant works to the Sydney Peace Prize Foundation.

Esther uses symbols typical of the Western Desert to represent the women collecting bush raisins. Esther often includes larger roundels to represent the grinding stones on which they grind the raisins into a sticky paste. The paste is then rolled into a ball and the women carry it with them for sustenance as they walk long distances. The small circles are the bush raisins, either loose on the desert floor or still on the bush. The series of consecutive lines are the tali (sandhills) in which the bush raisin grows.

Alongside her bush raisin paintings, Esther is closely associated with the stories of Marrapinti, a women's site west of the Pollock Hills in Western Australia that was painted before her by Naata, Nancy Ross Nungurrayi and Doreen Reid Nakamarra. In ancestral times a group of women camped at Marrapinti during their travels toward the east, and there they made the nose bones — marrapinti — from which the site takes its name, worn through the nasal septum; in the ceremonies connected to this place, the older women pierced the septums of the younger women taking part. In Esther's renderings of this Country, the lines carry the creek at the site and the sandhills that surround it — the same desert forms that hold her bush raisin story, turned to an older and more ceremonial purpose.

Click here to learn more about Esther's painting and Dreaming story.