Marina Warari Brown Pumani Australian - Pitjantjatjara, b. 1984

Marina Pumani Brown was born in Mimili Community on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the far northwest of South Australia. She comes from a long line of strong female painters. Her grandmother was Milatjari Pumani,who was one of the most famous artists in the APY region. Her mother is Betty Kuntiwa Pumani and her aunt is Ngupulya Pumani. Marina grew up watching these strong Pumani women paint. Learning from them, and beside them, she has since developed her own interpretation of the Tjukurpa passed on to her.

In her art practice, Marina shows contemporary ways of seeing her ancestral knowledge, sharing insights into her experience of day-to-day community life. She references her family’s homeland around Antara and Victory Well, which lie nestled in the granite hills of the Everard Ranges. Marina often spends the weekends out on country with her mother and daughter, collecting minkulpa (bush tobacco) and maku (witchetty grubs). She expresses her role in the larger story of cultural continuity in her unique and powerful paintings, which resemble abstract maps of the landscape she knows so well.