Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi was born in 1967, the eldest daughter of the great Papunya painter Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. She learned to paint from her father from an early age, and from the mid-1980s she and her younger sister, Michelle Possum Nungurrayi, helped with the dotting on many of his canvases.

She first gained recognition in 1983, aged 16, with an entry in the Alice Art Prize while a student at Yirara College in Alice Springs. She later settled on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Gabriella’s paintings are known for strong colours drawn from the desert landscape, decorative detail and storytelling. Her early Bush Tucker paintings showed the Women’s Dreamings of the Mt Allan area.

In the early 1990s she developed her best-known subject, the Seven Sisters Dreaming, in which the sisters (the Pleiades) and the Morning Star travel across the night sky. She also paints Grandmother’s Country, which she created as a 20-metre installation for the 2008 Chelsea Flower Show in London.