My Grandfather’s Country 2009

Curator: What strikes you about Sally Gabori's painting, completed in 2009, entitled "My Grandfather’s Country"? Editor: The intense chromatic heat, that blaze of cadmium red dominating the canvas, immediately jumps out. Then comes the black, an almost aggressive, stark form intruding into the field of colour. Curator: Gabori was an Aboriginal artist from Bentinck Island. Her paintings, largely abstract, are intensely connected to place. This painting carries with it a mapping, perhaps not geographically accurate, but psychologically charged. The red you see could evoke fire, but it is equally emblematic of connection, of deep knowledge of the land. Editor: I can certainly read a mapping of sorts. But to me, it's as if the artist is distilling experience down to its raw essence. This play of colour is elemental—a land mass defined by pigment. The thick application of acrylic, those energetic brushstrokes—it's pure gesture. Curator: Exactly! Her work encapsulates memory; this piece stands for the intangible idea of 'Country' for Aboriginal people: not just land, but stories, law, and ancestors all wrapped together in an inextricable spiritual knot. Her abstraction transmits more information than any illustrative work might have achieved. Editor: I’m fascinated by the contrast and, to be frank, how little it offers the viewer by way of the illustrative. You've this aggressively reduced composition of vibrant plane bisected by almost brutal darkness. One reads a dramatic tension. The relationship between these shapes, is really all we are offered. Curator: Perhaps this minimal vocabulary pushes us toward appreciating Country on a much deeper, fundamental level, by reducing landscape down to its cultural importance, making it impossible to view the artwork only as physical landscape? The artist, and by extension the indigenous group, imbues colours with powerful, enduring, multi-layered symbolism. Editor: That very reading transforms what might first be seen as bold visual economy into something much richer, offering us as outsiders entry into a deep cultural symbology. Curator: I agree, and it really exemplifies the symbolic load that colours, deployed knowingly and precisely, can bear. Editor: And it reframes the minimalist reading I initially gave to it, enriching what I presumed to be simple materiality.