Debra Young Nakamarra b. 1964

Debra Young Nakamarra is the eldest daughter of two significant Papunya Tula artists, Walangkura Napanangka and Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula. Debra was born in Warumpi (Papunya) in 1964, and in her youth, witnessed first hand the genesis of the Western Desert painting movement in the early 1970s. Debra's sister, Katherine Marshall Nakamarra, is also a renowned artist.

Debra's parents, particularly her father, were respected figures within the Pintupi community at the time and were custodians of a number of significant Dreaming stories. Debra began painting some of these inherited stories in 1984.

The year she took up painting carries real historical weight. When Debra began in 1984, the women of the Kintore and Haasts Bluff communities were just starting to make paintings of their own — until then, Pintupi women had assisted the men of their families at the canvas but had not painted the stories of the women's Dreaming tradition in their own right. Debra learned alongside her sisters under their mother's guidance — a third sister, Lorraine Yungut Nakamarra, also paints — and the family's own movements mirror the era: with the rise of the homelands movement they left Papunya and moved west, eventually settling at Walungurru (Kintore), some 530km west of Mparntwe near the Western Australian border, in the heart of their ancestral Pintupi Country.

Debra depicts her mother Walangkura's country in this painting, Tjintjintjin, a site north-west of Walungurru (Kintore). Tjintjintjin, a rockhole and cave site, belongs to the story of Kutungka Napanangka, an ancestral woman of the Tjukurrpa who travelled across vast stretches of the Western Desert on her journey toward the east. The places where Kutungka stopped became ceremonial sites, and Pintupi women have maintained the stories of her travels through generations of ceremony, song and dance — knowledge that passed from Walangkura to her daughters along with the visual language for expressing it.

Debra uses motifs that are reminiscent of her mother's style, however she utilizes dotting techniques that are characteristic of the Central and Western desert movements in a way that is all her own. Within that inherited iconography, Debra has staked out her own ground chiefly through colour: her palette runs bolder and often into unexpected combinations, and the distinctive colour groupings of her canvases have become the signature by which her work is known. Debra's artworks capture the features of her ancestral country, such as waterholes and rocky outcrops, that are intertwined with deeply significant Dreaming stories.