The Warmun Art Centre is a major centre for East Kimberley art and lies a couple of hundred kilometres south of Kununurra in northern Western Australia. It consists mainly of Gija speakers and many of the artists attached to the centre work within the artistic traditions established by Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie and Freddie Timms and that generation of pioneers.

This is the third exhibition in 12 months from the Warmun Art Centre to be shown at the Nancy Sever Gallery and on this occasion it is focused exclusively on the art of five women artists: Peggy Patrick, Betty Carrington, Lorraine Daylight, Nancy Nodea and Jane Tinmarie-Yalunga. What characterises most of the paintings in this exhibition is the use of textured ground ochres and blacks employed to map out the main forms on the canvas, frequently relating to sacred geographic locations or plants, that are then articulated with white dots to create bold, clear forms that have a slight shimmer from a distance.

Peggy Patrick, a woman in her late 80s, is the best known in the group and her work dominates this show. She is a senior Gija artist, who together with her work as a painter, is also known as a singer, dancer and storyteller as well as a law woman who represented her people on the Kimberley Land Council. Famed for her profound knowledge of her peoples' cultural heritage, in some of her work she has not shied away from stories of the "killing times" and, like the great Rover Thomas, in some of her art she references the killing sites in which she lost her grandparents.

Peggy Patrick is also known for her paintings of boab trees, called jumuluny, and examples of these are in this exhibition. She explains some of cultural associations of the tree. She says "this is the joomooloony [jumuluny], that's for women – ngalingalimboorroo. When women give birth out in the bush, they put their dinyjil [umbilical chord] in the boab tree, to make their babies strong. Then that boab tree belongs to that child." The tree also provides food and medicine so that "the people never got sick then" and in times of extreme drought the tree could be opened up to obtain water [goorloom].

In one of her majestic paintings, Jumuluny – boab tree (2014), the silhouetted trunk and branches of the tree, truncated by the edges of the canvas, take on almost a landscape dimension resembling a spreading river with its branching tributaries, while the dancing white dots provide a kinetic aspect that brings a degree of dynamism to the surface of the painting. The design is simple, but effective and memorable.

In contrast, Betty Carrington is an artist who has spent most of her life on the Texas Downs cattle station and has been painting for almost two decades. Many of her paintings relating to the hills of Darrajayin, Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) sites and narratives from Ngarrgooroon, her mother's country. She is the partner of the well known artist Patrick Mung Mung, but has maintained her own distinctive style. In a canvas such as Thirringgenyji (2014), this relates to some sort of owl, Betty Carrington emerges as an adventurous and subtle colourist, where, although she employs natural pigments, they are boldly juxtaposed to create an asymmetrical and vibrant composition.

This is perhaps not the most spectacular exhibition from Warmun to be seen at this gallery, but it does contain some recent strong fresh work and although all of the artists work within an established artistic convention, each has a distinctive voice.