Australia Day honours: Apt recognition for trailblazer Lena Nyadbi

Gija artist Lena Nyadbi has received an Order of Australia for her pioneering work as a contemporary Indigenous artist and a leader of the Warmun Art Movement.

Indigenous artist Lena Nyadbi. Picture: Alastair Miller

For more than two decades, Gija woman Lena Nyadbi has been a trailblazer of the Warmun Art Movement, whose canvases of the Barramundi Dreaming Story and the Kimberley have made her a leading figure in Indigenous art throughout the world.

Since the early 2000s, after her works began to appear in galleries across Western Australia and South Australia, her canvases have been exhibited extensively overseas, with her landscape depictions of Jimbala country, where she grew up, earning international recognition. Nyadbi has been recognised with an Order of Australia for distinguished service to the visual arts.

With Nyadbi now 86 and suffering from dementia, her award will be accepted by her granddaughter Kalenisha Peters, who said: “We are very proud of her art, the recognition and what she has done for our community.”

Her tradition has been passed on to her niece, artist Geraldine Bedford, who is developing the Barramundi Dreaming Story.