The Panel Show – 12 Aboriginal Artists

By selecting a long narrow format for their canvases, artists set a particular structure and composition for their works that challenge their sense of design and rhythm. The twelve artists in this exhibition find different ways to resolve their work when confronted with a canvas 120 x 30 cm long.

Thomas Tjapaltjarri uses the panel shaped canvas to create a vertical movement for the rectangles he uses to create his Tingari designs. Utopia artists Rosemary Petyarre and Janet Golder find the drifting leaves design adapts easily to the new vertical format. Joylene Reid Napangardi and Marlene Young Nungurrayi take another approach, effectively creating a small series of boxes inside the canvas panel, where they produce a series of repeating and related motifs, as though they were a multiple design made up to form a panel.

Sisters Debra Young Nakamarra and Katherine Marshall Nakamarra are able to segment the great Women’s Ceremonial designs that they inherited from their mother Walangkura, in order to make tensioned designs that lead off the edges of the canvas panel.

Nellie Marks Nakamarra and Yilpi Marks Atira paint elongated landscape pieces that are a natural fit with the narrow panel canvases. Equally Jorna Newberry paints the Fire Dreaming story from her mother’s country, where the moving fire front breaks up the panel landscape in an impressive way. The exhibition ‘The Panel Show’ will be on view at Japingka gallery from 8 April to 30 May 2016.