Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Painted at Bidyadanga, Western Australia
  Purchased from Raft Artspace, Darwin in September 2007
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Winpa works by the Yulparitja artists of Bidyadanga, Raft Artspace, Darwin, 11 August - 1 September 2007, cat no. 8
  Paintings from Remote Communities: Indigenous Australian Art from the Laverty Collection, Sydney, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 5 July - 31 August 2008
  The Colin and Elizabeth Laverty collection - a selection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art exhibition, Geelong Gallery, Geelong, 18 February to 15 April 2012
  
  LITERATURE:
  Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, pp.168-169 (illus.)
  Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, pp.170-171 (illus.)
  
  The multi-paneled paintings of Jan Billycan are the
  seminal pieces in her oeuvre. Watching her at work,
  she would begin to depict a story on one panel–her
  mind full of ideas and memories of the place of
  her birth Kirriwirri, of travelling from waterhole to
  waterhole in the desert–then run out of room and
  continue the narrative journey on another panel, then
  another. The largest of the multi-paneled paintings to
  date, All the Jila, 2006, is in collection of the National
  Gallery of Australia and featured in the first National
  Indigenous Triennial in 2007 (see Croft, B.L., Culture
  Warriors: National Indigenous Triennial, Canberra: National
  Gallery of Australia, 2007, p.68, illus.). It is in the large
  paintings that Jan Billycan captures the epic details of
  her personal and cultural histories that are laid bare in a
  visceral, gestural style.
  
  The landscape and bodyscape are continually merged
  in Jan Billycan's paintings. She raises issues of identity
  and the metaphysical nature of things, while playing
  on the idea that the land and self as one. Jan does not
  see the human form as differing from the land; they
  are one and reflect each other. The 'rib cages' in her
  paintings become sprawling 'tali' or sand dunes. The
  'intestines' are like walking tracks through the desert.
  Jan's paintings have the appearance of a naïve rawness
  that belies their emotional sophistication, and her
  complex understanding of the physical world. Jan walks
  the boundary of what is acceptable in art. She mixes
  colours directly on the canvas, working lines repeatedly
  until they have a density and a unique hue that reflects
  the individuality of each single sand dune in the desert
  or every single bone in the body.
  
  Jan Billycan is an important healer and medicine
  woman and highly respected elder amongst the desert
  people near Punmu, Pungurr, and Kunawarritji, and
  in the communities of Broome and Bidyadanga. She
  has been represented in several major exhibitions in
  Australia and abroad, most recently in Yiwarra Kuju:
  The Canning Stock Route at the National Museum of
  Australia, Canberra, 2010. In 2011 Jan Billycan won
  the Western Australian Artist Award at the Art Gallery
  of Western Australia.
  
  Emily Rohr
  
  This painting is sold with accompanying Short St Gallery documentation.

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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