Lola Nampijinpa Brown

“My dreaming, My Grandmother, Mother and Aunty at Willowra, they taught me to paint my dreaming.” Lola Nampijinpa Brown was born in Ti-Tree, NT, a small community 193 kms north of Alice Springs. When she was a little girl her mother and father took her to Willowra where she grew up. She went to school there and then to Alice Springs where she attended high school before moving to Mount Allan where she married her promised husband. She was married for 25 years. While living in Mount Allan Lola was an active member of the Museum. She made music sticks and necklaces, and painted coolamons and beads. Lola has 7 children and 11 grandchildren. Her three sons still live in Mount Allan and her daughters live in Willowra, Tennant Creek and Mount Allan. She likes to visit her children whenever she can. In 1994 Lola returned to Willowra for a short time before returning in 1997 to Mount Allan to live with her children. At Mount Allan she began painting but as there is no longer a Museum and Art centre in Mount Allan, she was dependent on the availability of materials. In 2002 Lola moved to Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal community 290 kms north-west of Alice Springs in the NT of Australia, to paint with Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, an Aboriginal owned and governed art centre. It was here in Yuendumu that she also met and married her present husband, Christopher Japangardi Poulson, who also paints with Warlukurlangu Artists. Lola has been painting with Warlukurlangu Artists since 2002. Lola attends the Art Centre every week day where she paints her Water Dreaming stories, stories which relate directly to her land, its features and animals. These stories were passed down by her grandmother, mother and aunty and their parents before them for millennia.