Nancy Nyanyarna Jackson was born at Kirritji. A place near Patjarr in the Gibson Desert, on her father’s traditional land. Her practice is grounded in intimate knowledge of place. Often returning to Patjarr and the surrounding lands, now recognised as the Pila Nature Reserve, to paint, hunt and visit sites of cultural significance. These trips, often lasting weeks, affirm a living relationship with Country. “Painting occupies the spaces between these activities, especially in the evening after dinner – when often the two ladies (Nancy & Nyungawarra Ward) will continue to work long into the night, sharing stories and recollections that both inform and reinforce their practice.” — Jacob Gerrard-brown. In this way, her paintings emerge not as isolated studio objects but as extensions of lived cultural practice, inseparable from land, memory and community.

Jackson’s works frequently depict tali, the vast sandhill formations of the Gibson Desert, and the tjukurrpa that survives them. One story recalls her grandfather, pursued across the desert by Tingarri men whose chase carved the dunes into the landscape. In some tellings, he was killed and transfigured, his body merging with the land itself. These events are not confined to the past; their traces remain imprinted on the desert and reticulated through Jackson’s canvases. Her meticulous dotting overlays carefully mapped underpaintings, each mark resonating with rhythm and intent, encoding ancestral knowledge into contemporary form.

Alongside tali, Jackson paints other significant narratives, including Karlaya Tjukurrpa (Emu Dreaming) and Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa (Seven Sisters Dreaming). In Karlaya Tjukurrpa, emus travel south and west before descending into a deep hole at Karrku, their feathers stained by the ochre rocks — a site where women continue to collect ochre for medicine today.

For Jackson, painting is both remembrance and renewal. Each canvas is an assertion of authority and belonging, reinforcing connections between generations and sustaining songlines. Her practice exemplifies the way desert painting continues to negotiate the threshold between ancient tradition and contemporary art. While her works command attention as ambitious aesthetic objects, they are foremost visual records of ancestral knowledge, mapping journeys and transformations in paint.

Since beginning to paint with Warakurna Artists around its inception in 2005, Jackson has developed a body of work that is deeply ambitious in scale and scope. Her paintings extend the legacy of Patjarr and Warakurna women artists who, despite the isolation of their homelands, have forged an internationally recognised contemporary art practice. They demonstrate the enduring vitality of Ngaanyatjarra culture, in which the act of painting is inseparable from story, place, and community life.

Jackson’s canvases insist on the persistence of Tjukurrpa. They refuse erasure, carrying forward spirit into the present and future. At once meditative and declarative, her work situates the viewer within a cosmology where land, history and kin are inextricably bound.