Larissa Napangardi Granites was born in 1980 in Alice Springs Hospital, the closest hospital to Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal community 290 km north-west of Alice Springs in the NT of Australia. In Yuendumu, Larissa attended the local school and after graduation spent 2 years studying at the Batchelor Institute, Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE) located in Darwin. On her return to her community she did volunteer work at the Old People’s Program, a program that cares for the elderly by helping them when they are sick, and being with them when they are alone or when they are frighten during storms. She also helped out at the local school preparing lunches.
Like her Mum, Peggy Napurrurla Granites and her grandmother Judy Napijinpa Granites, she paints with Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, an Aboriginal owned and governed art centre located in Yuendumu. As a little girl, she would watch her Mum and Grandmother paint and would listen to their jukurrpa stories. She began painting in 2014 and likes to paint her grandfather’s (on her mother’s side) Pirlarla Jukurrpa (Dogwood Tree Bean Dreaming). These stories relate directly to her land, its features and the plants and animals that inhabit it and are passed down to her by her parents and their parents before them for millennia. Overtime Larissa has developed an individualistic style using pattern, colour and design in a variety of contexts to depict her traditional jukurrpa.
When she is not painting—I love my painting—she spends time with her son, Alonzo when he comes home from school.
