THIS PUBLICATION HAS BEEN PRODUCED TO MARK THE TWENTYFIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CAIRNS ART GALLERY FOUNDATION, FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE CAIRNS REGIONAL GALLERY FOUNDATION. IN 2017 THE GALLERY CHANGED ITS NAME, AND THE FOUNDATION’S TITLE ALSO CHANGED IN ALIGNMENT WITH THE NEWLY NAMED CAIRNS ART GALLERY.
Over the past quarter-century, the Foundation has supported the acquisition of a remarkable body of works for the Gallery’s Collection. Of the abundant highlights in this publication, most works were selected from purchases made in recent years, and generally one work per artist is showcased. Twenty-eight artists are presented, and the total number of their works acquired by the Foundation is seventy-nine to date.
An important role of the Foundation is to raise funds to support the Gallery’s purchase of works for its Collection. In this way the Foundation plays a critical role, since the Gallery does not receive government funding for acquisitions.
The Gallery Collection comprises more than one thousand works of art, with around seventynine purchased for the Collection by, or with the assistance of, the Foundation or donated by private collectors through the Foundation.
The collecting priorities of the Gallery are upheld by the Foundation. Works of art are acquired to enhance and strengthen two key Collection areas: Australian and Indigenous art, with a specific focus on art produced in response to the unique heritage and living culture of the region and its changing cultural, social, and environmental conditions.
A particular emphasis is given to highly significant works that enhance the Gallery’s current holdings or fill gaps in the Collection. Priority is also given to works that open a dialogue between historical, contemporary settler and Indigenous art, and reflect the diverse cultural communities, histories, artistic practices and geographies of the region.
Central to this is the acquisition of works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to enhance our holdings of individual practitioners, as well as to represent identified centres of artistic excellence and Indigenous artists of renown.
Nationally significant works by artists outside of the region are also acquired to enhance the Gallery’s interpretation of Far North Queensland and its cultures, and their place within the world’s tropic zone.
Foundation support equates to a strong investment in artists across different stages of their careers. This is achieved by ascertaining works for the Collection through direct commissions and through exhibition projects initiated by the Gallery that help heighten the profile of artists and lead to longer term-career opportunities.
Importantly also, Foundation purchases may initiate the first representation of an artist in the Collection. This will raise an artist’s profile and add to the history of artistic production in the region, thereby enriching our place in the world.
2025
FOUNDATION LEGACY COLLECTION FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN
In 2025 the Foundation launched its Legacy Collection Fundraising Campaign, supporting the purchase of works by artists of high stature to create an enduring legacy for future generations. A priority of the Campaign is to purchase major works by leading artists as yet unrepresented in the Collection or enhance the existing representation of artists who have achieved national significance.
SIMONE ARNOL
UNCLE DAVID MUNDRABY FROM THE CROSS COUNTRY SERIES 2022
b. Cairns, Queensland
Gunggandji
Simone Arnol was born in Cairns, Queensland, where she continues to live and work. Arnol’s media includes painting, photography, fashion and design, dyeing, weaving and ceramics. Reflected in her art are stories about the time of church missionaries in Queensland who forcibly controlled the lives of many Aboriginal people during the nineteenth and twentieth and centuries. Through her portraits, Arnol captures identity, not as a fixed representation, rather as a changing representation that is shaped by context and different histories.
Arnol was commissioned by the Gallery to produce a photographic series in collaboration with Bernard Singleton Jnr, called Medicine clay for the 2021 exhibition, Ritual: The Past in the Present. The following year she was commissioned to complete the Cross Country series of thirteen digital prints for the exhibition, FACELESS: Transforming Identity: Blak/Black Artists from North Australia, Africa and the African Diaspora.
The rationale for FACELESS was to challenge established ideas of identity. Artists explored how interpretations of identity can be manipulated or redefined, and these blak/black artists used embellishment, erasure, and disguise to revise how the face can be perceived.
Arnol’s Cross Country series comprises portraits of three men from the Yarrabah community, north of Cairns, which was established as an Anglican mission in 1892. It was here that Aboriginal people who had been forcibly rounded up
from Queensland communities were sent for ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’.
This series led to Armol being awarded a Cairns RSL Artist Fellowship to produce a new series of photographs for her first solo exhibition at the Gallery entitled seeRED in 2023.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The Cross Country series by Simone Arnol was exhibited in the FACELESS exhibition in 2022 and included thirteen commissioned works. Nine were purchased with Foundation funds, representing Arnol’s first acquisitions in the Collection. Through her powerful images Arnol demonstrates a strong commitment to advancing an alternative history of First Nations peoples in Far North Queensland. This addition to the Collection recognised an artist from the region with a strong commitment to truth-telling in her work.
Simone Arnol is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Uncle David Mundraby from the Cross Country series 2022 digital print on papert 60 x 42 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2022 Commissioned by Cairns Art Gallery
DR CHRISTIAN THOMPSON AO
WHEN EVERYTHING IS KNOWN AND KNOWABLE 2022
Dr Christian Thompson AO was born in Gawler, South Australia. Through his work he advocates for First Nations peoples’ concerns and has contributed significantly to academic life internationally and in Australia. In 2018 he was awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the visual arts and as a role model for young Indigenous artists.
A sculptor, photographer and performance artist, Thompson also uses video and sound to explore identity, cultural hybridity, sexuality, gender, race, memory and history. In his live performances and conceptual portraits, he inhabits a range of personas in carefully staged poses and backdrops, wearing handcrafted costumes.
In 2022 The Gallery commissioned Thompson to create two photographic works for the exhibition, FACELESS: Transforming Identity, Blak/ Black Artists from North Australia, Africa and the African Diaspora. The Gallery was able to purchase one of these through the Foundation.
In When Everything is Known and Knowable, Thompson arranges an Indigenous face and four hands among Australian native flowers, prompting questions about a relationship between the figure and multiple hands. Native flowers are a powerful source of identity, culture and kinship for Thompson; they are allies and quintessential symbols of Australianness. “There is something about the beauty and the fragility of them and, at the same time, their immense power. I tend to gravitate towards things that have a kind of
votive energy and beauty.” (Christian Thompson in conversation with Hetti Perkins, 2017).
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The Foundation’s commissioning and purchase of When Everything is Known and Knowable was instrumental in the artist donating a second notable work from the exhibition, entitled We’re The Future, We’re The Past in 2023, further strengthening his representation in the Collection.
Dr Christian Thompson AO is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s First Nations Research Archive. b. 1974, Gawler, South Australia Bidjara
When Everything is Known and Knowable 2022
120
Purchased
funds from
C-type print on Fuji Pearl Mettalic paper
x 120 cm
Cairns Art Gallery with
the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2022
JANET FIELDHOUSE
MEMORY MARKS (SCARIFICATION)
2020
b. 1971, Cairns, Queensland
Kala Lagaw Ya / Meriam Mir
Janet Fieldhouse is a ceramic artist based in Cairns, Queensland. Drawing on her matrilineal connections to the Torres Strait Islander communities of Badu (Mulgrave), Muau (Moa), Kirri (Hammond) and Erub (Darnley) Islands as well as her father’s European heritage, her art is instilled with experiences and ideas sourced from family, culture, storytelling, and interactions with other First Nations people.
Fieldhouse works with a variety of techniques in ceramics and takes inspiration from traditional ceramic practices of the Pacific and the Americas. Fieldhouse’s sculptural pieces also draw on her continuing research into the material culture of Torres Strait Islander people held in museum collections, as well as the oral histories that have been handed down to her.
The Gallery commissioned artists to make works for the exhibition, Ritual: The Past In The Present presented in 2021. Janet Fieldhouse was among these artists, exhibiting eighteen works she described as, ‘the material culture, rituals of social and religious life, and artefacts which are created to fulfil the functional and spiritual needs of the peoples of the Torres Strait.’
Fieldhouse combines ceramic media with varieties of fibre to create direct and allusive expressions of her people’s culture. Writer Freja Carmichael noted that Fieldhouse has never physically performed Torres Strait songs or dance. But the works she makes unite performative practices with materiality and Torres Strait Islander identity.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
In 2021, with the assistance of the Foundation, ten works by Janet Fieldhouse were acquired for the Gallery Collection. These were selected from her series of eighteen works commissioned for the Ritual exhibition. The Foundation’s purchase provided the first representation of this notable artist in the Collection and led to Fieldhouse being awarded a Cairns RSL Club Artist Fellowship to produce new work for a major solo exhibition at the Gallery in 2024.
Janet Fieldhouse is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Memory Marks (Scarification) 2020 clay, feathers, jute string
58 x 30 x 30 cm; 58 x 25 x 25 cm Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with the assistance of the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2021 Commissioned Cairns
HEATHER WUNJARRA KOOWOOTHA
CREEPING LOYOUR CAINE, MEDIECINE 2019-2020
b. 1966, Cairns, Queensland
Wik-Mungkan / Yidinji / Djabugay
Heather Koowootha grew up in Yarrabah and undertook trips to Aurukun for family holidays. Her mother’s culture is Yidinji of Yarrabah people and her father’s culture is Wik Mungkan of Aurukun. Her father was taken from his mother to a Normanton Mission when he was twelve years old. Her mother at a young age was placed in the Yarrabah Mission. Koowootha’s art is inspired by teachings passed on to her from both parents.
Koowootha was commissioned to make new work for the 2021 exhibition Ritual: The Past in the Present. She produced a series of sixteen drawings of the life cycles of trees, herbs and flowers with explanatory text at the bottom of each work. The works explore the significance of local native flora based on their medicinal and magical properties and reflect the the traditional knowledge systems and cultural practices of the Yidinji and Wik Mungkan peoples.
In the Ritual catalogue essay, Freja Carmichael elucidated the nature of Koowootha’s forms of botanical knowledge as presented in her series:
Each drawing offers a reminder of layered interconnections existing between people, lands, waters and all living beings. For example, Cheese Fruit 2020 expresses how the cheese fruit plant is applied to the skin to treat colds and infections, particularly around the time of the wet season in the Cape York area. The stories and lived experiences bound to each plant are cited in Koowootha’s hand-written texts that accompany each work. The individual stories are vividly illustrated in bright colour palettes and energetic
shapes that celebrate the vitality of the plants and the knowledge that continues to transcend years, seasons, and many lifetimes of experience.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Koowootha produced her first watercolour on paper through her commission by the Gallery to create a textile design for the 2015 exhibition, Out of Queensland: New Indigenous Textiles. Six years on, the Gallery commissioned Koowootha to continue to experiment with watercolours through a series of paintings for the Ritual exhibition in 2021, which demonstrated her originality and technical accomplishment. Koowootha’s production of paintings on paper is limited and the Foundation’s purchase of twelve of the sixteen botanical works that were acquired for the Collection means the series remains unique to the Gallery.
Heather Wunjarra Koowootha is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Creeping Loyour Caine, Mediecine 2019-2020 watercolour and pen on paper 76 x 56 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with the assistance of the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2021 Commissioned Cairns Art Gallery
ALAIR PAMBEGAN
BONEFISH MAN & DANCING SPIRIT MAN – WINCHANAM CEREMONIAL DANCE 2020
b. 1966, Aurukun, Queensland Wik-Mungkan
Alair Pambegan was born in Aurukun, on the western side of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, where he continues to live and work. Pambegan’s practice includes large-scale paintings on canvas and installation works made from milkwood painted with ochres and charcoal. These are inventive interpretations of the ancestral stories told by his father, the late Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jnr, a highly respected Elder and nationally renowned artist.
Important custodial responsibilities for the Wik-Mungkan culture were handed down to Pambegan by his father, who was custodian of Walkaln-aw (Bonefish Story Place) and Kalben (Flying Fox Story Place), two significant ancestral stories of the Wik-Mungkan people. Pambegan’s father also showed his young son the locations of the natural ochres used in the ceremonial body painting for these stories and for painting the works of art derived from them.
The Gallery commissioned Pambegan’s two paintings, Winchanam Clan Body Design and Bonefish Man & Dancing Spirit Man –Winchanam Ceremonial Dance for the exhibition, Ritual: The Past in the Present, in 2021. These paintings reveal the use of body painting and totems in the Winchanam initiation ritual of the Wik-Mungkan people.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The Foundation assisted in the purchase of Alair Pambegan’s two works from the Ritual exhibition, which enabled the Gallery to represent this important artist in the Collection. The artworks are unique examples of Pambegan recounting ancestral stories from Aurukun.
Alair Pambegan is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Bonefish Man & Dancing Spirit Man – Winchanam Ceremonial Dance 2020 ochre and acrylic binders on linen
Purchased
Roland NANCARROW
No Borders for Migratory Birds 2008
synthetic polymer paint on polyvinyl chloride and wood approx. 215 x 296 x 7 cm (overall)
Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2020
ROLAND NANCARROW
NO BORDERS FOR MIGRATORY BIRDS
2019
Roland Nancarrow lives and works in Cairns, north Queensland and as an established artist working across the media of sculpture, painting and public art, he has exhibited extensively since the 1990s.
Nancarrow has completed more than 20 public art projects across Queensland since 1996, many of which featured birds, and in 2015 he created a series of sculptural installations that highlighted the annual migration of Torres Strait pigeons to Cairns.
Coupled with his fascination for birds, Nancarrow has an enduring passion for the tropics. On a trip to South America, he explored the relationship between tropical birds and plant life, and on return to Cairns, he increasingly began to study local birds, their habitats, family relationships and breeding habits. Nancarrow’s exhibition, Bird Encounters, was held at The Gallery in 2022–23.
Nancarrow was invited to present a new work for the Gallery’s biennial exhibition ARTNOW FNQ 2019 that showcases the best of the region’s art, craft and design and enables the Gallery to acquire outstanding works by leading regional artists for its Collection. Nancarrow’s sculptural installation No Borders for Migratory Birds was selected for acquisition by visiting judge Max Delany, CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
The title of Nancarrow’s installation, No Borders for Migratory Birds (2019) is testimony to his deep concern for the effects of global warming on bird populations around the world.
The Gallery purchased No Borders for Migratory Birds with funds from the Foundation in 2020. This secured representation of Nancarrow as a notable Cairns-based artist whose creative investigations align with significant environmental themes within the Collection.
Roland Nancarrow is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase. b. 1949, Warwick, Queensland
JENNIFER VALMADRE
OSSIFIED SCRIBBLING 2019
b. 1963, Cairns, Queensland
Jennifer Valmadre is a Cairns-based artist whose practice encompasses ceramics, sculpture and encaustic painting. Valmadre travelled extensively before returning to tertiary education in her late twenties to gain a Bachelor of Education in Visual Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma of Research Methods.
Valmadre’s travel influences and recollections of sugarcane harvests during her rural childhood blend with the ambience of her rainforest home and studio to nourish her ideas. She routinely experiments with raw materials and transforms their properties for application in new ways, in sculpture, ceramics and on two-dimensional surfaces.
Valmadre was invited to present a new work for the Gallery’s biennial exhibition ARTNOW FNQ 2019 that showcases the best of the region’s art, craft and design and enables the Gallery to acquire outstanding works by leading regional artists for its Collection. Valmadre produced a large ceramic installation work entitled Ossified scribbling that was selected for acquisition by visiting judge Max Delany, CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
The artist described the work as her evolution of mark-making from pen and paper to mud and the development of her dexterity to, ‘manage my material: how to increase its strength and reduce its fragility; how to make a fine and robust line resilient enough to survive the 1200°C required to change it from a soft mud to a hardened ceramic.’
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Valmadre is a notable Cairns-based artist and educator. In 2020 the Foundation provided funds to purchase Ossified scribbling to strengthen the Gallery’s representation of the artist’s work in the Collection.
Jennifer Valmadre is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Jennifer VALMADRE
Ossified scribbling 2019 mid-fired ceramics
150 x 250 cm (overall)
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2020
BRIAN ROBINSON
PADA KUYK: POWER BEYOND THE GRAVE 2019
b. 1973, Waiben (Thursday Island), Queensland
Maluyligal / Wuthathi / Dayak
Brian Robinson lives and works in Cairns, Queensland. He is nationally and internationally recognised, Robinson is an established artist specialising in printmaking and public sculptures, with subjects drawn from mythology and popular culture across varied civilisations.
Robinson’s ideas are original and often playful, connecting ancient cultural motifs across time and place with pop-culture motifs. However, they are grounded in the age-old sea-voyaging epics of the Torres Strait that historically were vehicles for transferring knowledge between island cultures. Indeed, the sea voyaging theme embodies Robinson’s perspective on the circulation of ideas and exchange between diverse cultures. Comicbook heroes, Greek temples and cartoon figures are rendered within Pacific cosmologies, while Pacific patterns and designs are reinvented to symbolise global contemporary life.
Recent art by Torres Strait Islander artists is an important collection focus of the Gallery. Having emerged as part of the dynamic Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander printmaking movement fostered in Cairns during the early twenty-first century, Robinson’s preeminent place in this movement is widely acknowledged.
The Gallery’s work, Usal – the seven sisters that play amongst the stars was produced for his 2016 exhibition, Pacific Crosscurrents and purchased for the Collection through funds donated by Rosemary Goodsall, a long-term Foundation member and Life member of the Gallery.
The linocut print Land Sea Sky – charting our place in the universe from the same exhibition was purchased with funds provided to the Foundation by Leigh Heidenreich and Peter Bosel Lawyers.
Robinson’s heritage is embodied in the words of his titles: Pada Kuyk: Power beyond the grave and Usal–the seven sisters that play amongst the stars. Customs and ceremonies handed down in the form of story, song, dance and artefacts are as much part of Robinson’s visual language as his inventive designs derived from Pacific and SouthEast Asian culture.
SIGNIFICANCE
FOR THE COLLECTION
Robinson is an important regional artist with a national reputation. The purchase by the Foundation of three works brings the total holdings of the artist’s works to ten in the Collection.
Brian Robinson is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2020
Brian ROBINSON
Usal – the seven sisters that play amongst the stars 2016 linocut printed on paper and mounted to board, pine dowel, rattan, shells, raffia, twine, feathers, plastic beads, plastic skull
100 X 230 X 10 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from Rosemary Goodsall through the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2016
MELANIE HAVA
BARRIER REEF BUBBLES I 2019
b.
Melanie Hava was born in Mount Isa, Queensland, and currently lives and work in Cairns, Queensland.
When she was twenty-three years old, Hava travelled to Austria to live with her father’s family and learn about European cultures. On returning to Australia, she moved to Cairns to be close to her mother’s Country. Her work is a unique fusion of cultural influences from both sides of her family.
Through her Aboriginal name, Winden (green pigeon), Hava connects with her mother’s Mamu Country, close to the spirits of rainforest and reef. She descends from the Dugul-barra and Wari-barra family groups, from the Johnstone River catchment of the Far North Queensland Wet Tropics and the adjoining Great Barrier Reef.
Hava equally embraces the fact that her father comes from the oldest city in Austria, Enns (Upper Austria) and she has absorbed its folk and European cultures. The architecture, patterns, gold leaf and occasional Swarovski crystals in her art reflect these European influences.
Hava was invited to present a new work for the Gallery’s biennial exhibition ARTNOW FNQ 2019 that showcases the best of the region’s art, craft and design and enables the Gallery to acquire outstanding works by leading regional artists for its Collection. Hava produced her first circular paintings of tropical sea life entitled Barrier Reef Bubbles and one of the paintings was selected for acquisition by visiting judge Max Delany, CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Following the acquisition of Barrier Reef Bubbles I by the Foundation, Hava was awarded a Cairns RSL Artist Fellowship that enabled her to develop an ambitious nine-metre-wide painting on paper showcasing the flora and fauna abounding on Mamu country, south of Cairns. In carrying out this work Hava introduced a new approach to her painting, working from direct observation of her Country and opening up a panoramic exploration of waterfalls and mountain ranges. The work was exhibited in 2023 in Hava’s first solo exhibition at the Gallery entitled, Melanie Hava: Bugan Mungan and was subsequently purchased for the Gallery Collection.
Melanie Hava is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
1982, Mount Isa, Queensland Mamu / Dulgu-barra / Wari-barra
Barrier Reef Bubbles I 2019
synthetic polymer paint and gold leaf on canvas
120 x 120 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2020
PATRICIA PICCININI
NO FEAR OF DEPTHS
2019
b. 1965, Freetown, Sierra Leone
Patricia Piccinini lives and works in Melbourne, Victoria. Her works of sculpture, photography, video and installation explore the advances of bioscience and technology. Piccinini is internationally known for her life-like mutant creatures fashioned of silicone and hair, which question scientific progress and ethics.
Since the early 1990s, Piccinini has produced hybrid human and animal forms to encourage discussions about bio-technological interventions. In combining the cute and the grotesque and inviting maternal instincts to nurture in spite of aversion to strange beings, she elicits empathy regardless of how monstrous, deformed or artificial her creatures may appear.
As a leading artist and Australia’s representative at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Piccinini’s work is provocative, empathetic and imaginative. These qualities were evident in the work she produced for an important exhibition in 2019, Life Clings Closest. A research residency during the previous year was organised by the Gallery, facilitating Piccinini’s interaction with Cairns-based marine biologists and various scientists researching unique reef and rainforest environments.
The Life Clings Closest exhibition included seven new works stemming directly from the artist’s residency in the region, and together with earlier works the exhibition presented a compelling installation of hybrid creatures that together posed questions rather than offered answers to the many complex questions facing humanity today.
For the sculpture No fear of depths Piccinini probed the relationship between nature and people, between the artificial and the natural, and between creatures and the environment. Also embodied in No fear of depths are the elements of paradox and hybridity, important themes in her work, which are implicit in the ecology and cultural construct of the tropics. Whilst in Cairns, she became increasingly excited about the rarity, obscurity and fecundity of life forms in Far North Queensland, and about the opportunity to produce new works that would broaden the artistic and conceptual parameters of her practice.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The Gallery purchased No fear of depths with the assistance of the Foundation in 2019 and is the only collecting institution in Australia with an edition of this work. It was a highly significant acquisition aligned with the Gallery’s tropic-zone interrogations, which Piccinini pursued in her compelling way in order to create this work.
No fear of depths 2019 silicone, fibreglass, hair 120 x 110 x 150 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with the assistance of the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2019
MICHAEL MARZIK UNTITLED
FROM THE PARKINGLAND SERIES 2015-2017
b. 1961, Sissach, Switzerland
Michael Marzik is a photographer and arts professional who lives and works in Cairns, Queensland.
Marzik produced the series of black-and-white digital photographs entitled Parkingland over a twelve-month period between 2016 and 2017, in which he captured everyday places in and around Cairns. Using his car windscreen as a framing device, the vignettes of parking lots, street corners and suburban shopping centers are often bleak and discomforting. Even so, Marzik’s lens sees aesthetic value in the ordinary and mundane.
Marzik was invited to present twenty works from the Parkingland series for the Gallery’s biennial exhibition ARTNOW FNQ 2017 that showcases the best of the region’s art, craft and design and enables the Gallery to acquire outstanding works by leading regional artists for its Collection. Marzik’s photographs were selected for acquisition by visiting judge Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
By purchasing four digital prints in the Parkingland series, the Foundation paved the way for Marzik’s donation of the remaining sixteen works. The collecting interest of the Gallery is to reflect contemporary views of the Cairns region, which aligns with the artist’s observations of these ‘overlooked’ parking environments in the urban tropics.
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2018
left to right
Grace Lillian LEE
GRACE LILLIAN LEE
A WEAVE THROUGH TIME 2017
b. 1988, Cairns, Queensland
Grace Lillian Lee was born in Cairns, a descendant of the Doolah family from Erub (Darnley Island). In 2010 she graduated in Fashion Design at RMIT University in Melbourne and has become one of Australia’s leading Indigenous artists and fashion designers.
Lee is deeply interested in exploring the relationships between contemporary fashion, design, traditional cultures and communities, and she is particularly focussed on manifesting her cultural connection to Torres Strait Island traditions in contemporary ways. Her distinctive body sculptures unite traditional weaving, fashion and body adornment. Lee mastered a palm leaf weaving technique known in the Torres Strait as ‘prawn weaving’ or ‘grasshopper weaving’. The renowned artist Uncle Ken Thaiday from Darnley Island mentored Lee in this technique and from it has sprung her unique ornamental designs.
In 2021 Lee was selected as an artist in the exhibition Ritual: The Past in the Present. She created three body sculptures for Ritual, using contrasting materials that reference a different point in time. The first garment is contemporary in style and is made from white cotton webbing, the second is futuristic using synthetic materials while the third is constructed from traditional organic materials including leaves, twigs and bark.
A supporting video shows three generations of women in the artist’s family adorned in Lee’s garments to highlight the intersecting cultural knowledge of those generations.
Lee’s attention to the materiality of her body sculptures positions them alongside other significant Torres Strait Islander artists in the Collection who produce masks and other ritual objects with a contemporary approach.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
In 2016 The Gallery commissioned and purchased the first four body sculptures to be produced by Lee, which led to major commissions of body sculptures by other galleries and museums in Australia and to her recent collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier to produce body sculptures for Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion Freak Show at the Brisbane Festival in August 2024.
The Foundation purchased A Weave through Time in 2018 for the Collection, strengthening the Gallery’s holdings of the artist’s work.
Grace Lillian Lee is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Meriam Mir
DANIE MELLOR BALA
BANDAGAA (A PROCESSION OF HISTORY) FROM THE CROSS COUNTRY SERIES 2018
b. 1971, Mackay, Queensland
Mamu / Ngagen / Ngajan
Danie Mellor was born in Mackay, Queensland and currently lives in Bowral NSW. For more than twenty years Mellor’s artworks have circled back to the culture and landscape of his matrilineal Country of the lower Atherton rainforest region near Tully, Far North Queensland, and homelands of his ancestors, the Mamu, Ngagen and Jirrbal peoples. Mellor’s father is of Scottish descent, and the intersections of Western and Indigenous philosophies and his connections to ancestorial rainforests anchor his work.
Mellor regularly returns to the Atherton Tablelands region. On field trips he continues to receive and absorb knowledge about his Aboriginality and his Country, particularly through a strong relationship with Jirrbal Elder and educator, Ernie Grant. Spending time on Country with Ernie Grant and his family has become an annual personal ritual and pilgrimage for Mellor.
In 2018 with funds from the Foundation, the Gallery commissioned Mellor to produce a new work for his exhibition Danie Mellor: Proximity and Perception. That work is Dulgu-burra (a procession of history).
As though peering into another time and place, Dulgu-burra (a procession of history) pictures daily life in an idyllic scene of Bama (rainforest people) beside a river. Two men in conversation hold spears and Balan Balan (rainforest shields cut from the buttress of fig trees). Other men wear Jawun (unique biconical-shaped woven baskets) around their foreheads and walk with young ones held aloft. Two women sit in front of a low
thatched shelter, looking up from their weaving. The scene under a white river gum canopy is also occupied by colourful kingfishers, king parrots and satin black birds. It is Utopian in one sense; however, the landscape also conveys what Mellor refers to as ‘Arcadian melancholy’, stating “This landscape speaks ... of colonialism, and an age of expansion that irrevocably transformed the lives of people and complex ecology not just of Northern Queensland, but Australia and also the globe.”
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The commissioning of Dulgu-burra (a procession of history) by the Foundation led the artist to donate a triptych and three other works to the Collection, and a major collector to donate a further significant work by the artist, bringing the total number to seven works in the Collection.
Danie Mellor is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s First Nations Research Archive.
page 35-36
Danie MELLOR
Bala bandagaa (a procession of history) 2018 wax pastel, crayon, coloured pencil, wash with oil pigment, watercolour and pencil with glitter and Swarovski crystals on paper 98 x 149 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2018. Commissioned Cairns Art Gallery
TONY ALBERT
EYES IN THE SKY 2018
b. 1981, Townsville, Queensland Girramay / Yidinji / Kuku-Yalanji
Tony Albert lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales.
Albert works across drawing, painting, photography and installation, and along with Vernon Ah Kee and Richard Bell, was a founding member of the Queensland Indigenous art collective proppaNOW. He is highly regarded artist both in Australia and overseas. Politically driven, Albert’s work confronts stereotypical images of Aboriginality and the colonial history that attempts to define him. He inverts the legacies of colonialism to question how we understand race and difference. Certain political themes and visual motifs recur in his work, including representations of the ‘outsider’ and Aboriginalia (a term Albert coined to describe kitschy objects and images that feature naive portrayals of Aboriginality).
Albert’s wall installation, Eyes in the Sky is circular, containing vintage motifs, playing cards, numerals and alphabet letters. The playing cards depict landscapes symbolising the artist’s concept of time as pre-colonial and colonial states, while the presence of the Nike symbol signals Albert’s dislike of global branding. By including ‘British’ bunnies Albert points to rabbits as an introduced pest which also symbolise the frontier violence to which Aboriginal Traditional Owners were subjected. Albert expands on the latter subject by using Pacman motifs, where in this electronic game, a circular entity moves around the maze chasing and eating ghosts, who try to flee. The bullets represent the Aboriginal men and women
who went to war for Australia – men as soldiers and women as nurses.
Eyes in the Sky was commissioned by the Gallery for the 2018 exhibition, Continental Drift: Black/ Blak art from South Africa and North Australia. The commission supported The Gallery’s major research interest in Queensland Indigenous art and culture, and issues of Australian race, history and representation within a global context. The exhibition challenged the uncomfortable truths surrounding the colonisation of Australia and South Africa and how these truths have shaped the construction of contemporary black/blak personhood.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Eyes in the Sky is the first work to represent Tony Albert in the Collection and this acquisition led the artist to donate a significant single-channel video work entitled Moving Targets in 2019, which was also presented in the Continental Drift exhibition.
Tony Albert is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s First Nations Research Archive.
Eyes in the Sky 2018 vintage playing cards, coasters and matchboxes on hardboard
150 x 180 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2018 Commissioned by Cairns Art Gallery
DANIEL O’SHANE
MEURAM AND ZOGO NI PAT
2015
b. 1990, Cairns, Queensland
Miriam Mer / Kuku Yalanji / Kulkaga
Daniel O’Shane lives and works in Cairns, Queensland. In his prints he has developed his own unique minar, or traditional patterning style that draws on his ancestral Islander and mainland Aboriginal heritages. These two cultures combine in the stories and characters of O’Shane’s artwork. He demonstrates highly accomplished printmaking techniques and often incorporates warr, a detailed, wave-like patterning as a backdrop for the figures which carry the narratives in his prints.
The work, Meuram and Zogo Ni Pat was purchased by the Gallery from the ARTNOW FNQ exhibition in 2017, with funds from the Gallery Foundation. The artist’s description of this work sets forth a detailed ancestral story involving his own tribe. It begins:
Many centuries past, the Meuram tribe inhabited the north-eastern section of Erub, now in the common tongue known as Darnley Island, Torres Strait. To the West and the Southwest of the Meuram people, three other tribes including Samsep, Saisarem and Peiudu occupy the island. The Samsep and the Peiudu share traditional borders with my people, the Meurams. One day the principal chief of my people had sent the Meuram hunters out to sea to capture the first mating female turtle of the annual season, so they could celebrate with a tribal feasting and dancing. In turn the hunters set off in their two big canoes led by a man named Desarr and the lead hunter Damoi, accompanied by their
crewman. The village chief and people stood on the beach at Keirari (the main village of the Meuram people) wishing them successful hunting. Bonau, Damoi’s favourite wife and children were also there to say goodbye, however, there was a strange atmosphere unlike previous hunting trips when sailing eastward.
Zogo Ni of the work’s title translates as ‘sacred story water’ and the narrative ends with The Meuram tribe enjoying Zogo Ni for everyday use such as healing and gardening. They guarded this water jealously, keeping it a secret from the other Erub tribes and living prosperous and sicknessfree lives for many years.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The purchase of O’Shane’s work by the Foundation made it possible for the Gallery to represent this foremost printmaker with Meuram and Zogo Ni Pat, his first work in the Collection. Daniel O’Shane is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s First Nations Research Archive.
Meuram and Zogo Ni Pat 2015 hand-coloured vinylcut on paper 196 x 102 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2018
Vincent BABIA
Legend drum of Wakemab 2017 wood, seed pod, goanna skin, cane, feather and shark tooth
55 x 140 x 52 cm
Purchased Cairns Art Gallery with funds from the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, 2018
VINCENT BABIA
LEGEND DRUM OF WAKEMAB
2017
b. 1970, Waiben (Thursday Island), Queensland
Ait Koedal / Kalaw Kawaw Ya
Vincent Babia is from Seisia on the northern tip of Cape York Peninsula. He relates culturally to his ancestral home on the eastern side of Saibai Island in the Torres Strait.
Babia is a highly regarded sculptor of ceremonial masks, canoes and drums with works represented in the National Gallery of Australia.
In 2019 Babia was invited to present a new work for the Gallery’s biennial exhibition ARTNOW FNQ that showcases the best of the region’s art, craft and design and enables the Gallery to acquire outstanding works by leading regional artists for its Collection. Babia’s exhibition work, Legend drum of Wakemab was selected for acquisition by visiting judge Max Delany, CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
In 2019, Wakemab became the focus of Babai’s first solo exhibition, entitled Koey Buwai Mab: Migration from Saibai Island to Cape York at the Gallery, that examined the voluntary mass migration of a community from Saibai Island to the mainland after World War II. In this exhibition, Babia drew on chronicles of Saibai Island and the pearl luggers’ journeys to the mainland, through sculptures and related vinyl cut prints.
Babia is a master craftsman who uses natural materials to carve replicas of fauna and marine life, and importantly, dance paraphernalia. Legend drum of Wakemab is an important example of his work. As the artists states:
My art tells the stories from the seven clans
of Saibai Island, though I mainly focus on my clan, the crocodile clan, Ait Koedal. Most of the people from Saibai are traditionally head-hunters; we are a warrior culture, strong and proud. Our dances and our art reflect this culture. I use our people’s totems when telling our stories, whether in painting, carvings or in dance.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Vincent Babia’s carved and sculpted Legend drum of Wakemab is the first work by the artist in the Collection. It is an important example of Sabai culture and traditions that are part of the littleknown history of Australia that Babia manifests in his art. The Gallery purchased this workin 2018 with funds provided by the Foundation.
Vincent Babia is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
JAMES MORRISON
GOODENOUGH BAY 1959
2016
b. 1959, Goroka, Papua New Guinea
James Morrison was born in Papua New Guinea. His parents were farmers and lived in a rural area near Goroka, in the highlands of PNG. Morrison moved to Melbourne in the early 1980s, but he frequently returned to the Papuan Eastern Highlands.
His childhood experiences of the tropical landscape of PNG play a significant role in his creation of the colourful, imaginary landscapes and mysterious narratives found in his art which are concerned with the natural world and are expressed in painting, drawing and sculpture.
The painting Goodenough Bay, 1959 was commissioned for the exhibition James Morrison: Re-imagining Papua New Guinea at The Gallery in 2016. It depicts a war of the worlds, a clash of alien exoticness and the traditional and naturalistic. Goodenough Bay is in the Milne Bay Province, northeast of Port Moresby. At the top centre of the picture, a UFO hovers, referencing the event of 1959 when a mass sighting of UFOs occurred in the area. The local pastor who reported the event said there were figures on top of the craft waving to the people below. Morrison explains the composition of Goodenough Bay:
I have arranged the plants as if as a florist. The tableau has been styled on exotic destinations. The female face is looking away, her head covered by a bilum. I have her slightly out of focus, almost as if she is fading away from this scene. The white hand offering the strawberry is a very loose play on Paradise Lost. Also, when the white explorers
first entered the Highlands in 1930, the people thought they were ghosts or walking corpses because of their whiteness. Maria, the female robot from the Fritz Lang film, Metropolis is emerging from the darkened space that the woman is receding into.
The high-key surreal narratives concerning the collision of colonial experiences with the hubris of the colonisers makes Morrison’s work unusual. Following James Morrison: Re-imagining Papua New Guinea at The Gallery, he has exhibited at major Australian institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art for the Sydney Biennale in 2024
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The commissioning of Goodenough Bay, 1959 and its acquisition through the Foundation was important as it initiated the Gallery’s collection of works by artists that engage with the specific cultural and environmental conditions of the tropics within the context of our region and our close neighbours of the Asia Pacific region.
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2017 Commissioned Cairns Regional Gallery
James MORRISON
Goodenough Bay 1959 2016 oil on linen 91 x 91 cm
ALICK TIPOTI
KISAY DHANGAL
2014
b. 1975, Badhu Island, Queensland Badhu / Argan / Wakaid
Alick (Zugub) Tipoti is from Badu Island, Zenadh Kes (Torres Strait). Still based on Badu, Tipoti’s extensive creative practice includes linocut printmaking, sculpture, mask making, and choreographing and performing traditional Zenadh Kes dance accompanied by chants. One of very few people who speaks his language fluently, Tipoti’s works detail complex stories about the history and culture of his people, to which his practice is deeply committed.
Tipoti has been a leading figure in the contemporary Torres Strait Island art movement from the mid-1990s and remains one of its foremost innovators. His work transforms traditional carving techniques using turtle shell and wood onto non-traditional media such as aluminium, bronze, fibreglass and printmaking.
The 2015 exhibition at The Gallery entitled, Alick Tipoti: Zugubal Spiritual Ancestors, was the first solo exhibition he held at a public gallery. It was from this exhibition that his work Kisay Dhangal was purchased with funds from Robina Cosser through the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation in 2015.
One of three Kisay (moon) prints of 2015, the aura cast by the maternal protective figure of Kisay is shown in yellow. The knowledge of Kisay is handed down in traditional songs, stories and importantly, dance, with the enduring Kisay dance performed to the beat of the Warup (drum). Kisay Dhangal refers to the nocturnal rituals of hunting dugong. Yellow moonlight arching around the image relates to how Zugubal ancestral spirits
guide hunters and fishers by understanding ecological conditions.
The Kisay works demonstrate Tipoti’s application of colour areas to black-and-white linocut prints, perfected through his collaboration with master printmaker, Theo Tremblay.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The purchase of Kisay Dhangal completed the unique group of three Kisay works in the Collection and brought the Gallery’s total Alick Tipoti holdings to twenty-four works. The National Gallery of Australia holds fourteen works, and Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art holds seven works.
Alick Tipoti is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nation Research Archive
Kisay Dhangal 2014 hand-coloured vinylcut on paper 70 x 70 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from Robina Cosser through the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2015
DONALD FRIEND
GUITARIST AT ‘FARNDON’, HILL END, BRISBANE 1963
1915-1989, Sydney, New South Wales
Donald Friend was a painter, draughtsman and writer especially admired for his drawings and watercolours on paper.
A leading artist during his lifetime, it was after the posthumous publication of Friend’s diaries that condemnation arose. The diaries chronicled his lifetime, his artistic discoveries and revealed his self-confessed paedophilia. In addressing this reality, the Art Gallery of NSW states, ‘Considerable debate has ensued about whether it is appropriate to collect and display Donald Friend’s artworks. Given the Gallery’s historically formed collection and Friend’s existing place in Australian art, the Art Gallery of NSW will retain works while not in any way condoning Friend’s conduct.’ The Gallery maintains the same position.
Friend’s many accomplishments included serving as an official war artist in the Pacific and winning the Blake Prize for religious art in 1955. Among his wide circle were fellow artists Margaret Olley, Jeffrey Smart and Brett Whiteley who are also represented in the Collection.
Two Donald Friend works in the Gallery Collection, The bed on the verandah, Cairns and Guitarist at ‘Farnden’, Hill End are significant because of his links with the region and his friendship with Margaret Olley. Members of the well-known Sailor family of Cairns are represented in both pictures and the Sailors, having met Friend when he first visited Cairns in 1932, dubbed him ‘Duke’. Friend worked with the Sailor Family on pearling and trochus luggers prior to his further travels.
The bed on the verandah, Cairns was painted
in 1954 during an extensive Queensland trip after returning from Europe and the United Kingdom. The sombre palette and modernist painting style is characteristic of Friend’s approach, and the reclining male nudes were subjects often revisited by Friend. The painting was purchased with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation with the assistance of Mr. John Bell-Allen in 2011.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Guitarist at ‘Farnden’, Hill End, Brisbane 1963 was purchased with Foundation funds. It contributes to the understanding of the relationships that Friend built while visiting the Far North region and provides a direct link with an existing Collection work by Margaret Olley, The Guitarist. Both paintings depict members of Cairns’ Sailor family and were painted during one of Friend’s sojourns at Olley’s family home. The two works purchased by the Foundation expanded to five Friend works in the Collection.
Guitarist at ‘Farndon’, Hill End, Brisbane 1963 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 57 x 79 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2015
FRED WILLIAMS
INLET, WEIPA
1977
1927-1982, Melbourne, Victoria
Fred Williams was born in Melbourne and is one of Australia’s most respected and influential twentieth-century artists. His landscapes were mostly painted in oil but a favoured medium was also gouache, used for his preliminary sketches and as final paintings on paper.
Despite spending limited time in the north of Australia, Fred Williams produced a remarkable and innovative series of gouaches that reimagined the vast, unrelenting spaces and fragile natural world of the north. In 1977, Comalco Ltd (now Rio Tinto) commissioned Williams to produce works in response to visiting their mining operations at Weipa. He travelled for the first time in a light plane and viewed the enormity of the Australian landscape from an aerial perspective. Profoundly affected, Williams created what many still consider his finest works – the Weipa series
Comprising around 50 works painted in his Melbourne studio, Williams drew upon the photographs, sketches and spontaneous recollections of his experiences over several days. For these works Williams extended his gouache painting techniques to capture the immediacy of witnessing a luminous sea and the air mingling with intense mineral-earth colours.
New compositional formats arose in the Weipa series. The work, Bauxite Coastline II 1977 (cover image) shows strips of sea and land without horizons, suggesting an infinity of coastline. The overall dynamism of the Weipa series seems to derive from its synthesis of abstraction, realism and recollection.
In 2018 the Gallery presented Fred Williams: Weipa series, Cape York, the first exhibition in Australia to bring together a major body of works from the series. The aim of the exhibition was to showcase two works from the Collection, Bushfire, Weipa I purchased by the Gallery in 1999 and Inlet Weipa purchased by the Foundation in 2014 together with three other works donated by Lyn Williams AO in the same year.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The Gallery is committed to collecting and presenting seminal works by artists who have either visited or relocated to the Far North Queensland region and built special relationships with people and locales. The purchase of Inlet Weipa in 2014 by the Foundation led Lyn Williams to donate a further three works to the Collection in the same year, bringing the total number of Weipa gouaches to eight in the Collection. The Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia together have the largest holdings of this series in public collections, and the Gallery’s acquisitions enabled further research into significant art responding to our region.
Inlet, Weipa 1977 gouache on Arches paper
57.0 x 75.5 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2014
NAOMI HOBSON
NAOMI HOBSON 2014
b. 1979, Lockhart River, Queensland Southern Kaantju / Umpila
Naomi Hobson was born in Lockhart River, Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, and grew up in Coen, a small township of 300 people.
Since 2008 Hobson has exhibited widely both within Australia and internationally. Her colourful abstract compositions reflect her individuality and a shared identity, and she is continually inspired by the vast traditional lands and cultures of her ancestors surrounding the town of Coen.
Situated at the bottom of the McIlwraith Ranges (part of the Great Dividing Range), Coen is surrounded by the east coast of Cape York Peninsula. Here many river systems snake down to the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef through rainforest and open wooded country; this is the landscape of Hobson’s paintings. Local clans include Kaantju, Umpila, LamaLama, Ayapathu, Wik Mungkan and Olkola. Through her art Hobson continues her family tradition of political and social engagement and upholds the embeddedness of cultures and Country within her being.
Hobson’s painting, Big Place, was an important early work by the artist and her first work to enter the Collection. It was purchased from Hobson’s second solo exhibition at Alcaston Gallery (Melbourne) in 2014 with funds from Foundation.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Following the purchase of Hobson’s early painting, the Gallery has commissioned three series of photographs that have received national and international acclaim. In 2019 the Gallery commissioned Hobson to produce a series of twenty photographic portraits of young people in Coen entitled Adolescent Wonderland for her exhibition of the same name. Hobson has since expanded this series and produced a major publication. In 2021 the Gallery commissioned the 1 January series for the Ritual exhibition that were donated by the artist to the Gallery and, in 2024, the Life on the River series. There are 18 works by Naomi Hobson in the Collection, including the Foundation’s purchase of Big Place.
Naomi Hobson is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nation Research Archive
SEGAR PASSI
UNITY AND STRENGTH
2014
b. 1942, Dauar, Queensland Miriam Mir
Segar Passi grew up on Mer, (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait. He was a self-taught artist from childhood and began painting in the 1960s. His meticulous observations of marine and birdlife, weather conditions, and daily scenes on the island have set him apart from the many Torres Strait Islander artists concentrating on traditional styles of carving and mask making.
Early confidence was instilled when anthropologist Margaret Lawrie asked Passi to make paintings and drawings that recorded the history, culture, flora and fauna of the Torres Strait. In the 1960s Passi produced more than 135 remarkable watercolours and sketches for Lawrie’s project.
As his style developed Passi adopted bold, saturated colours and a directness of composition. His paintings hold a strong place within the artistic traditions of the Torres Strait but are also recognised as contemporary art, poetic and powerful in knowledge.
A cultural custodian, Passi retains extensive knowledge of weather conditions and their importance in the lives of his people. Rhythms of seasons and tides are read in the changing shapes and colours of clouds, and as a sea hunter, Passi knows if conditions are safe for sea voyages. He remains committed to passing this knowledge on to younger generations.
In 2012 the Gallery commissioned Passi to paint four works reflecting his observations and knowledge of cloud, wind and rain conditions.
Then in 2014, the Gallery invited Passi to hold his first solo exhibition, Segar Passi: Bakei – 1960s to the Present, bringing together a large selection of his paintings made between 1968 and 2014. Six additional works were commissioned for this exhibition and three works were acquired by the Gallery with funds from the Foundation. Their titles are Unity and Strength, Woven Strong and Feast.
Segar Passi is no longer painting but bestows a legacy as an elder, stateman and remarkable artist represented in many public and private collections
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Segar Passi is among the most important Torres Strait elder artists, adding high significance to the Foundation’s purchase of Unity and Strength, Woven Strong and Feast. The Gallery has fourteen works by Passi in its Collection, the second largest holding in an Australian public collection, next to Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art that holds twenty of his works.
Segar Passi is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Unity and strength 2014 synthetic polymer paint on canvas
50.5 x 76 cm each
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2014
ABE MURIATA
JAWUN - RED
2013-2014
b. 1952, Tully, Queensland Girramay
Abe Muriata resides in Cardwell, Far North Queensland. His traditional Country and language are Girramay of the Cardwell Range area, and he is a painter, potter, weaver and shield maker. Significantly, Muriata is regarded as a master craftsman in the field of basket weaving and is one of the few males pursuing this practice in Australia.
Unique to the rainforest peoples around Cardwell, Muriata is inspired by jawun, the bi-cornial baskets made from lawyer cane woven with great precision by his ancestors. They were used for fishing, leaching and gathering, and larger ones for carrying infants between settlements along rainforest trails.
As a child Muriata observed his grandmother making jawun and later taught himself the weaving skills required to produce them. His baskets are of such refinement that they are nationally recognised and highly sought after as museum pieces.
Muriata also extends traditional forms, materials and practices by making baskets constructed from recycled industrial materials and ceramics. He likens these contemporary resources to the natural materials available to his people in the past
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
In 2014 the Foundation enabled the representation of Abe Muriata in the Collection with these two important examples of baskets constructed of wire. Muriata’s production is limited and highly sought after by institutional and private collectors nationally and internationally.
Abe Muriata is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Jawun – red
SHIRLEY MACNAMARA BUSH FASCINATORS
b. 1949, northwest Queensland Indjalandji / Alyawarr
Shirley Macnamara grew up on a cattle station near Camooweal, where her family worked. By attending Australian Flying Arts School workshops in regional Queensland, she began painting with watercolours, then developed her mixed media, installation and sculpture practice before turning to weaving local spinifex to create organic forms.
Macnamara maintains close ties with her mother’s Country, Indjalandji Dhidhanu, which surrounds Camooweal and her late father’s Country at Lake Nash, Alyawarr. The native spinifex grass that she weaves into sculptural objects recall traditional Indjalandji Country and her cattle station near Mount Isa.
While mustering cattle, Macnamara takes note of places where materials are located. Later she gathers spinifex, ochre, animal bones and feathers to create guutu (vessels), baskets and large installations reflecting forms found in nature. Her sophisticated spinifex grass sculptures draw on age-old traditional weaving techniques and encode spiritual connections to her culture.
The two Bush fascinator sculptures in the Gallery’s Collection, purchased by the Foundation in 2014, are made of spinifex and recall her Country’s natural features. They embody a powerful aesthetic and cultural importance in their forms.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Macnamara’s production is limited and highly sought after, and her two Bush fascinators purchased by the Foundation were the first works representing this notable artist in the Collection. In 2020 Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art presented a major exhibition of her art and included these works. The Gallery has gone on to develop a strong relationship with Macnamara, resulting in major commissions for exhibitions and the acquisition of further outstanding examples of her work for the Collection.
Shirley Macnamara is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
spinifex with kangaroo and emu bone
Purchased
spinifex with Crimson Winged Parrot feathers
YESSIE MOSBEY
CHIEF’S DHOERI 2012
b. 1982, Masig (Yorke Island), Queensland Gudumadh / Kulkalgal
Yessie Mosby was born on the island of Masig, commonly known as Yorke Island, a very small, low-lying coral cay in the central islands cluster of the Torres Strait, Queensland.
Mosby is a performer of traditional dance and songs, and importantly for this practice, he is a master craftsman in the making of Dhoeri headdresses. On Masig Island Dhoeris are made using only natural materials that include local plants, bird feathers and native seeds.
Mosby’s great-grand uncle taught him the art of Dhoeri making and modelled respect for the natural materials collected to make them. Mosby is the third generation of eldest sons within his clan group, the Gudumadh. He claims that the more he makes Dhoeris the more he feels at one with his ancestors, and the more his passion and respect grows for making the Dhoeris of his clan and his tribe, Kulkalgal, and his Island, Masig. He expresses gratitude to his two Kulba thathi (deceased ancestors) for guiding him in making Dhoeris, a sacred practice to his people. Mosby says, “I am extremely proud to be the youngest of my tribe and one of the very few who hold this special gift.”
The artist explained the origin and purpose of the Dhoeris:
Those boys to be initiated are taken by their tribal leaders from the main village to a young men’s camp on another Island where they are trained to be warriors. There they are also under the watchful eyes of Kai Maidalaig. He is the sorcerer of the art of poisons,
spells of death and healing among his other supernatural powers. Some selected youth are chosen to learn the sorcerers’ craft. Others are trained in the art of warfare and taught the men’s roles within the community. All of these Masig Island Dhoeris are part of these tribal youth ceremonies.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
The four Dhoeris were purchased by the Foundation in 2012 and represent the first works by Yessie Mosby to be acquired for the Collection. Mosby produces highly significant cultural objects, and he is one of the few people continuing the traditional manufacture of such Dhoeris in the Torres Strait.
Yessie Mosby is represented in the Cairns Art Gallery’s Artist Showcase and the First Nations Research Archive.
Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2012
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2010. Commissioned Cairns Regional Gallery
Peter KINGSTON Feathered muse, Trinity Inlet, Cairns 2010 oil on canvas
180 x 304 cm
PETER KINGSTON
FEATHERED MUSE, TRINITY INLET, CAIRNS 2010
1943–2022, Sydney, New South Wales
The Australian artist Peter Kingston lived and worked at the edge of Sydney Harbour among a community of artists and friends. He was a regular visitor to Far North Queensland, and as a passionate conservationist, maintained longstanding links with others in the movement who championed rainforest preservation, especially cassowary habitats.
Celebrated for the spontaneity of his rapid sketching style, his drawings and other works on paper often possess wry humour, whimsy and charm. Great reverence is expressed in Kingston’s works for life on and around the waters of Sydney Harbour. Similarly, in his oil painting, Feathered muse, Trinity Inlet, Cairns Kingston’s deep appreciation of harbour life is expressed in rich tones.
Kingston’s work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney; the Museum of Sydney, several regional galleries and internationally by the Biblioteque de la ville, Belgium; Costen Library, Los Angeles and the National Film Library in Tokyo. In 2019, The Beagle Press published the artist’s second monograph titled Peter Kingston, written by Barry Pearce.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Feathered muse, Trinity Inlet, Cairns is the only oil painting among other works in the Collection by Kingston. It was commissioned by the Gallery and purchased with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation in 2010. Kingston has also been a generous patron of the Gallery donating twenty works including prints, drawings and a sculpture whose subject is the conservation of the Hinchinbrook area.
DENNIS NONA
GAIGAI PAKAIL (TAILS OF THE TREVALLY) 2007, CAST 2010
b. 1973, Badu Island, Queensland Wakaid / Kala Lagaw Ya / Yumplatok
Dennis Nona began his art practice in 1989. As a young boy, Nona learnt the traditional skill of woodcarving, which he later translated into the intricate marks of his linocuts, etchings and sculptures. As a pioneer of the contemporary Torres Strait art movement, Nona led the way in the imaginative rendering of the ancient myths and legends of his heritage and the wider Torres Strait oral traditions of storytelling and dance.
Notwithstanding Nona’s creative achievements, his reputation remains controversial following a prison sentence of five years in 2015. The Gallery acknowledges Nona’s existing place in Australian Indigenous art, and will retain his works in the Collection, cognisant the Australian judiciary dealt with his case.
The bronze sculpture, Gaigai pakail (tails of the Trevally) was purchased by the Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation. The sculpture was first produced in 2007 as an edition of twelve and the Foundation purchased the fifth work in the edition, cast in Brisbane by Urban Arts Projects in 2010.
The artist recalled as a young boy walking along the beach with his friends hunting for fish and squid with their bamboo spears. In the early mornings on the incoming tide (Arapka) they observed fish tails sticking out of the water in the lagoon. These belonged to the trevally feeding on worms and sea grass pods called Nara. Their tails moved along with the tide, which, when seen from a distance, Nona likened to the sails of a canoe.
The sailing tails of the trevally are celebrated in traditional island songs.
In his sculpture, Nona depicted the tails connected to the surface dwelling fish, Longtom (Baiyag), to represent the canoes and their sails. The shapes beneath the Longtom’s belly represent the seed pods and worms on which the trevally feed.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Dennis Nona is considered a pioneer of the Indigenous black-and-white printmaking movement that emerged in the early 2000s. The Foundation’s purchase of Gaigai pakail (tails of the Trevally) strengthened Dennis Nona holdings by adding the first bronze sculpture to the fifteen works in the Collection.
Dennis NONA Gaigai pakail (tails of the Trevally) 2010
cast bronze
65 x 152 x 25 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2010
RAY CROOKE
QUINKAN COUNTRY, LAURA
1989
1922–2015, Auburn, Victoria
Ray Crooke was born in the Hawthorn area east of Melbourne. Two years into the Second World War, Crooke enlisted in an army unit traversing vast parts of Australia, and by 1942 was stationed at the tip of Cape York and on Thursday Island, locations that indelibly marked the future direction of his work.
In 1951 Crooke settled permanently in the Far North region, residing at Buchans Point, Holloways Beach and Yorkeys Knob.
Crooke became nationally recognised in 1969 when he won the Archibald Prize with a portrait of his friend the writer, George Johnston. His Pacific and Torres Strait Islander portraits set in tropical landscapes were thereafter widely appreciated and his dry-country landscapes of the Laura region, the Gulf Country, Hill End, along with his early Victorian landscapes, remain celebrated in Australia.
The work, Quinkan Country, Laura, of 1989 was included in the national touring exhibition, Encounters with country: landscapes of Ray Crooke, curated by Gavin Wilson and presented by the Gallery in 2005. The Gallery later purchased Quinkan Country, Laura with the assistance of the Foundation in 2010. Nearly twenty years before Quinkan Country, Laura was painted, George Johnston wrote perceptively about Crooke’s relationship with landscape. In a 1970 essay, Johnston observed that in Crooke’s work, ‘the flow of time is present in its pure, metaphysical sense.’
The tonal relationships of earth colours in the rocks, grasses and tree-trunks of Quinkan Country,
Laura demonstrate Crooke’s command of his palate and composition. The work was part of many that arose from his 1969 excursion to the Palmer River gold fields of the 1870s, to rediscover with fellow artist-adventurers Percy Trezise and Dick Roughsey the notorious Hell’s Gate pass. It was on this trip the group passed through the Aboriginal settlement of Laura, with the panoramic sandstone-ridge country supporting the famous Quinkan rock art of an area known as Jowalbinna.
SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Purchased with the assistance of the Foundation in 2010, Crooke regarded Quinkan Country, Laura as his best painting from the Jowalbinna experience. He was not only an Australian artist of national stature but a generous and important donor to the Gallery, donating over fifty-seven works by himself and other artists to the Collection.
Quinkan Country, Laura 1989 oil on hardboard 121 x 91 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with the assistance of the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2010
Tim STORRIER AM
Over Cape York 2007 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 107 x 198.5 cm
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2008
TIM STORRIER AM
OVER CAPE YORK
2007
b. 1949, Sydney, New South Wales
Tim Storrier AM lives and works in Bowral, New South Wales. Storrier is a celebrated landscape painter both in Australia and overseas. He was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to art in 1994.
The Painting, Over Cape York is the product of an art expedition undertaken in 2007 in remote northern parts of Queensland by a group of Australia’s most recognised artists: John Olsen, Garry Shead, Luke Scibberas and Storrier. The artists travelled west from Cairns to Chillagoe and Normanton, north along the coast of Cape York to Bamaga and finally across the Torres Strait to Thursday Island, returning to Cairns via Cooktown. Much of this trip was experienced on a six-seater Cessna 402C aeroplane.
The expedition was variously labelled by the participants as the “Cape York Art Tour”, a “Johnny Olsen’s flying circus” and “four old farts go bush” and was conceived over dinner at Storrier’s house in Bathurst. In an article about this adventure published by The Age newspaper in 2006, Storrier, then aged 57, recalled how Olsen became his close friend and mentor: “I first met John –when? In the 1960s – when I was a mere flyspot on the windscreen of art. ... He used to call me the Liquitex Kid, after an American paint I used”.
The large acrylic on canvas work, Over Cape York documented the immensity of the landscape experience for Storrier. It captures the luminescent sky he witnessed from his window seat while traversing the Cape York region. SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE COLLECTION
Over Cape York was purchased by the Gallery with the assistance of the Foundation in 2008 and is the first representation by this important artist in the Collection and documents one of the many narratives of artists journeying through the Far North to create art.
TOM RISLEY
IRON BARK FOREST
2003
b. 1947, Rockhampton, Queensland
Tom Risley was born in Rockhampton, central Queensland, and his family moved further north to Cairns three years later. An established and idiosyncratic sculptor, for the last two decades of his life Risley worked in the relative isolation of his studio-home in Herberton on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland.
Risley was largely self-taught, combining traditional carving techniques learnt from his sculptor father with technical skills refined in various trade positions. His work is seen as a personal expression of the physical and cultural environment of the Far North, and as a compulsive scavenger, the old mining town of Herberton and its surrounds provided ideal materials and inspiration for his assemblages and constructions.
In 1981, Risley was included in the First Australian Sculpture Triennial where he attracted national acclaim, and in 1992 the Queensland Art Gallery hosted a major survey of his work titled, The Indigenous Object and the Urban Offcast.
Written as one word, “ironbark” describes a group of Australian eucalyptus trees known for their extremely hard, deeply furrowed bark that resembles iron slag. Risley’s 2003 relief sculpture, Iron bark forest, is a landscape work created in his diptych format, a compositional device but also an allusion to the traditional structure of a picture with foreground and background, or in this case an aerial view of the bushland surrounds of Herberton
The Gallery purchased Ironbark Forest in 2009 with funds from the Foundation, acknowledging his stature as a Far North Queensland artist with a national reputation, and one who made a significant contribution to Australian art in the Twentieth Century. Ironbark Forest is one of six works by Tom Risley in the Collection.
Purchased Cairns Regional Gallery with funds from the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation, 2009
Tom RISLEY
Iron bark forest 2003
found metal, epoxy paint, caulking compound, paste & ink on canvas on plywood
