Jimbirla Country
Lena NYADBI
2007 | natural ochre on canvas | accession number 797
purchased by the Art Board 2007 - Murdoch University Art Collection
© the artist and Warmun Arts

Lena NYADBI

born 1937 Walmanjilukum (Greenvale Station), Western Australia
lives and works Warmun Community (Turkey Creek), Western Australia
Skin name: Nyawurra
Language group: Gija

After a busy life working the cattle stations of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Lena Nyadbi started painting when the Warmun Art Centre opened in 1988.

Lena Nyadbi served her 'apprenticeship' under the guidance of some of Australia's most distinguished artists. Today she is one of the leading artists working at Warmun, the Aboriginal community close to Walmanjilukum where she was born. Warmun is acknowledged as the birthplace of the contemporary art movement for which the East Kimberley region is renowned.

By watching and assisting the elders, Nyadbi learned practical painting techniques and the cultural intricacies of transferring customary designs into contemporary paintings. In many ways, the synergy of the traditional and the contemporary in art reflects the integration of the past and present in the spiritual world known as the Ngarranggarni. The afterlife journey of the woman and its cultural interpretation in the Gurrir Gurrir ceremony may be understood as a metaphor for the conceptual logic that underpins much Aboriginal art.

In Nyadbi's art, key icons that relate to her country provide a template for her experimentation with colour and space. Depicted either in combination or individually, symbolic references to Diawul the ancestral barramundi, represented by its u-shaped scales, or the Commission's lozenge-shaped jimbirla (spearheads) or gemerre (scarification marks), prevail. Diawul’s scales are found in material form in the artist's country as diamonds. The jimbirla or spearhead stones are scattered throughout the artist's father's country.

For the Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, Nyadbi has effectively enhanced the manipulation of negative and positive space that characterises her work. The jimbirla and gemerre images rendered in relief on the facade of the building evoke the hewn edges of chipped stone, as well as the ridge marks of ceremonial body scarification. The scale of Nyadbi's installation expresses the physical vastness of her country and the infinite cosmology of the Ngarranggarni. 

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