All About Art - Annual Collectors Exhibition: Counterpoint•Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924 -2015)

While Gabori and Riley’s practices are distinct, the two artists show parallels in the way they saw, understood, and recalled their Country through paint, capturing the light and colour of far north Australia.

Both Gabori and Riley are saltwater people, from the coastal areas of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Gabori’s Country is south-east along the coast, at Bentinck Island in far-north Queensland, while Riley’s Country is Limmen Bight area and the Limmen Bight River in the Northern Territory of Australia. Gabori and Riley painted this coastal area of northern Australia in sweeping aerial depictions of Country, translated from their mind’s eye to canvas. They depict the Gulf of Carpentaria as it is seen and held in their mind - depictions of landscapes that cannot simply be captured en plein air but that are layered and complex recollections of place incorporating centuries of inherited knowledge.

Gabori and Riley each relished the acrylic medium and became renowned for their fearless embrace of intense, pure colour – azure and turquoise blues, oranges, pinks, greens, reds, yellows, and milky whites – and it is therefore no coincidence that both artists herald from the brilliant and dazzling sub-tropical light of far north Australia. They both seem to float enigmatically over their landscapes.

Gabori was noted for singing her paintings, and we are left wondering about her life on Bentinck Island before contact: the trauma she endured as a young woman being taken to another land and society, but never in doubt of the colour in her mind; her deep love of her small island home; her Kaiadilt family, including ancestors; or the sea in all its vast wonderment. As stated by writer and curator Judith Ryan AM, "Her canvases of ambitious space, broken colour and vigorous gesture startle the viewer into abandoning their preconceived notions of Aboriginal art... Gabori’s energetic brush had an aura all its own."1

Whilst Riley incorporates his Marra knowledge pictorially, including his totems such as the Ngak Ngak and Four Arches, his paintings, like Gabori, suggest something deeper from within, behind, beyond or in the absence of the visual surface. Riley’s are painted similarly to gujiga song cycles – continuous Marra stories in ceremony, moving forward, same but different. Never repeating an image but always the same!

Together Gabori and Riley’s paintings emphasize and clarify the unique beauty of the Gulf of Carpentaria of Australia  each a counterpoint to the other, they capture the colour, light and knowledge of the mind’s eye to canvas.

© The Estate of Sally Gabori, Courtesy Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne 2024

1. Judith Ryan AM, Senior Curator, Art Museums at the University of Melbourne 

2.From the essay: The Eye of the Dolphin: Sally Gabori and the Kaiadilt Vision, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2022, Professor Nicholas Evans, Page 13-32