Mavis Ngallametta’s ‘Wutan’ has personal significance

Wutan #2 2014 (illustrated) depicts a specific tract of land and its waterways in the Cape York region, Far North Queensland, leading to a site of significance to Mavis Ngallametta (1944–2019) — a sister work to Ngak-pungarichan (Clearwater) 2013 (illustrated). This large portrait-format landscape uses its height to chart a tract of land and water,…

What is a Still Life?

What do you associate with the term still life? Is it highly detailed, and realistic painted images of flower bouquets and tables laden with lavish bowls of fruit and game from a time past? Yes, the still life genre uses inanimate objects such as flowers, fruit and vegetables, and manufactured items to symbolically reflect on…

Kangaroo Story

Kumantje Jagamara OAM (1946-2020) was one of the foremost champions of the Western Desert painting movement and a deeply respected Warlpiri/Luritja Elder and senior cultural leader of the broader Papunya community. He was a dynamic innovator of Papunya’s second wave of painters known for creating evocative new forms to portray his ancestral inheritance. DELVE DEEPER:…

Intimately sized plaques allude to public memorials

Indigenous Australian objects and remains were removed from their resting places and collected by museums throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In To know and possess 2021 (illustrated), which adopts the commemorative trope of the bronze plaque, Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall highlights this history, and the debate that continues around repatriation, for contemporary audiences. Watch:…

Photographic tableau highlights historical injustices

Nature Morte (Agriculture) and Nature Morte (Blackbird), from Australian photographic artist Michael Cook’s ‘Natures Mortes’ series, draw on visual strategies affiliated with the still‑life genre — particularly the memento mori, a visual reminder of the inevitability of death — to highlight the devastating impact of colonisation from an Indigenous point of view. Michael Cook ‘Nature…