Shirley Purdie (born 1947) is a contemporary Indigenous Australian artist, notable for winning the 2007 Blake Prize for Religious Art.
Purdie was born in 1947 at Gilbun, or Mabel Downs Station, in Western Australia's Kimberley region,[1][2] daughter of Madigan Thomas.
[1] Purdie was taught by her mother and by major Kimberley Indigenous artist Queenie McKenzie, two women who were among the first to paint at Warmun in the early 1980s.
[3] Her work Stations of the Cross was washed off the walls of the[ Warmun Art Centre]] in the catastrophic floods of March 2007, and when later recovered from beside the creek it was found to have been seriously damaged.
The work portrays the Christian iconography of the 14 Stations of the Cross, but also the history of conflict and racial violence in the artist's community in the 1920s and 1930s.