Lena Nyadbi (circa 1937) Gimmenbayin Cave
Lena Nyadbi (born circa 1937)
Gimmenbayin Cave
bears artist's name, dimensions and Warmun Art Centre catalogue number 225/06 on the reverse
natural earth pigments on linen
82 x 198cm
Sold for AU$ 21,600 inc. premium

Footnotes

  • PROVENANCE:
    Painted in 2006
    Warmun Art Centre, Turkey Creek, Western Australia
    Superannuation Fund of William Nuttall and Annette Reeves

    Gimmenbayin is a cave between Bow River and Lissadell Station, where Nyadbi grew up, in the heart of her father's traditional lands in the eastern Kimberley. This ancestrally created land is the constant source of inspiration and subject of Nyadbi's paintings, yet rarely does she represent features in the landscape as figuratively as in the central section of this work. Typically, in Nyadbi's paintings country is encoded through recurring rows of short dashes indicating jimbala, or stone spearpoints, and kumerra, cicatrices. Indeed her father's country is known as jimbala country. The inverted U-forms in this work refer to scales of the ancestral barramundi Dayiwul. The scales are the diamonds that are mined in the region today. Dayiwul Ngarankarni, 2008, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, is a related work featuring many of the elements in Gimmenbayin Cave, 2006 (see Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana (eds.), Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection Highlights, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2010, p.96).

    Wally Caruana

Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art


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