Artworks

Spotlight ON: SALLY GABORI

Gabori portrays her country as a vastly abstracted colour field. Landscape and moreover its depiction from an aerial perspective can be interpreted from the painting’s rugged texture and arrangement of colour in distinct blocks, but namely from its title. Gabori’s country was Mirdidingki, the toponym that her forename comes from, its suffix -ngathi translating from Kayardild language as “born at”. Gabori’s identification with this place is implied by the possessive in My Country’s title and the perceivable intimacy of the artist’s contact with her medium. In My Country, Gabori smeared technicolour acrylic across the breadth of the canvas. Her broad lashes of paint bleed at the contact points between colours, showing the speed at which she worked and her alla prima (wet on wet) treatment. My Country’s formation of shocking white, pink, orange and blue contours suggests vast passages of sand, salt, sea and sky made iridescent by bright sunshine. Brilliant colour such as this also tells of the vibrancy Gabori felt from the world that she saw.

My Country evokes an attitude of observing and spontaneously reproducing the appearance of a landscape as it changes under shifting light conditions in a passing moment, and this relates further to Gabori’s biography. Gabori and the other Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island were forcibly removed by missionaries to Mornington Island in 1948, which catalysed decades of immense social and geographic dislocation. It was during this period that Kayardild was hardly ever spoken and traditional culture was virtually abandoned. Gabori returned to Bentinck Island in the 1990s when a small outstation was built in the southeast at Nyinyilki, and even then, it was not to stay but to visit. When she began painting at Mornington Island Arts, Gabori had spent half her life separated from her country, witnessing the dampening of her culture and language. Gabori’s personal life informs a biographical reading of her collected works, as they were not only vigorous and fervently produced but also stylistically idiosyncratic, as are paintings by other Kaiadilt women artists practicing in the same era. These works arguably embody Gabori’s individuated way of seeing and comprehending her world.

- Antonia Crichton-Brown, excerpt from Living Tracks: Networks In Indigenous Contemporary Art.