Nora Wompi Nungurrayi was born c. 1935 at Pingakurangu rockhole near Kunawarritji or Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. She died in 2017. Nora Wompi was famous for painting her country around her Kunawarritji homelands a place associated with the Minyipuru Jukurrpa (Seven Sister Dreaming).
As a young woman Wompi followed the drovers of the Canning Stock Route north to Balgo Mission where she stayed for many years. There she learnt to paint in the late 1980s with her close friend, Eubena Nampitjin. She returned to Kunawarritji when it became a community in its own right in the 1990s. Today she paints for both the arts centre Martumili close to her homeland and at Warlayirti Artists, Balgo where she maintains close connections.
Wompi’s evocative renditions of her place were aptly described by writer Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian in a 2009 survey of the Desert Mob exhibition at Araluen in Alice Springs:
“.. Wompi's painting of Kunawarritji, painted "wet on wet" with consummate skill, seems at once to conjure up the essence of a mythic world: its colours, which clash, then harmonise, hint at a set of shapes, a way of seeing country X-rayed, a way of linking place and memory.”
Her work featured in the major and culturally-rich Canning Stock Route return to birthplace project that resulted in a highly acclaimed exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Australia and has been highly collected by private collectors and public collections.
In 2013 she was announced as one of 16 Australia-wide finalists in the prestigious biennial Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
© Warlayirti Artists and McCulloch & McCulloch
