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Gurrutu: The Art Of Mulkun Wirrpanda is the result of an ongoing relationship between JGM Gallery’s Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi and the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre. Guerrini Maraldi says of the association that “We (JGM Gallery) have had a longstanding relationship with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre. It is an honour to be entrusted with this exhibition by both the Art Centre and the artist’s estate.”

Every piece in Gurrutu: The Art Of Mulkun Wirrpanda is, in some sense, a profoundly insightful self - and societal - portrait, the macro expressed through the micro. this is particularly true of the depictions of termite ecosystems. These mounds are populated, not by the termites themselves, but by their symbiotic partners: northern meat ants, known to the Yolnu as “nadi”. The term “gurrutu” refers to Wirrpanda and the Yolnu’s understanding of the cosmos, what William Stubbs describes as a “...matrix

of meaning... which is invisible to us and too complex for casual comprehension.” It is perhaps most easily comprehended, however, through the work of Wirrpanda who conveyed a familial bond with every natural element she depicted.