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.