Dibirdibi Country 2010

Sally Gabori, an Australian Aboriginal artist, painted “Dibirdibi Country” with bold brushstrokes and a vibrant palette. The painting feels like it came into being through intuition, with shifts and adjustments along the way. I can imagine Gabori standing before the canvas, deciding where to lay down the next stroke of that powerful magenta, the almost-black, or the feathery white. It's as if she’s translating memories of her homeland, Dibirdibi Country, onto the canvas, transforming it through colour and gesture. The paint is applied with confidence, thick in places, creating a textured surface that invites you to touch it. Take the magenta form at the top: its jagged edges and varying shades of pink seem to mimic the unpredictable forms of nature. It reminds me of the work of other painters who similarly used abstraction to convey the essence of a place. Artists are constantly in dialogue, aren't they? Each work builds upon those that came before, transforming and expanding our understanding of what painting can be. It’s not just about representation, it’s about feeling, about the embodied experience of being in the world, and how these can be expressed without fixed meaning.