Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney

RELATED WORK
Wamungku - My Mothers Country, 1996, wool tapestry, 400.0 x 800.0cm, housed at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra


This monumental painting is a remarkable rendering of Riley's Mother's Country for which he is custodian and is replete with the distinctive iconography that recurs throughout his oeuvre. This masterful and exuberant work is the largest known example by the artist and is the design for an even larger tapestry now hanging in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra. Riley relished the experience with the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne and was inspired by seeing his work transformed into a new medium.

The unique geological formation of the Four Archers on the Limmen Bight River is given prominence, symmetrically repeated on either side of the canvas to emphasise its importance as a touchstone of his mother's country. Riley has also given prominence to the serpent iconography, with five inhabiting the vast landscape. In the waterhole at the foot of the Archers dwells their creator, the powerful snake Ancestor, Garimala – a taipan who, in some episodes of the creation story, transforms into a rainbow and is associated with the wet season. In the present work, the wet season is instead conveyed via the rainclouds and also relates to the artist's mother.

Garimala often features in Riley's work in another guise: Bulukbun the malevolent fire-breathing serpent-dragon. Riley also paints Bandian, the King Brown snake who created places in Ginger's father's mother's Dreaming.

Multiple sea eagles in various colours are dotted throughout the composition alluding to the artist's saltwater country and representing Ngak Ngak, the white-breasted sea eagle, creator of the artist's mother's country and also its guardian. Framing the work and elements within the composition is the repeated triangular design of Riley's traditional bodypainting design.

The composition is set across numerous 'layers or terraces...celebrating important features from different viewpoints in the one composition. These brilliant colouristic experiments and radical perspectives continue to characterise Riley's painting style, which is never fixed or formulaic.'1 This vibrant work is set against an electric sunset-orange sky and features the artist's iconic blue: 'Riley is a singular colourist with an incandescent vision for as he puts it, 'I have to see it: it must be bright'...Riley enjoys working with paint, mixing, layering and experimenting with colours and different visual effects and therefore building up country...the artist's whole body of work can be read as a series of variations upon a single theme of great substanceand moment, with colour providing the main point of differentiation.'2

1. Judith Ryan, 'Ginger Riley Munduwalawala: A Seeing Artist', Artlink
Magazine, December, 2001 accessed March 2021, artlink.com.au
2. Ibid.