Public Curators Building

Brush: Women Painters brings together the work of eight trailblazing women: Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Birrmuyingathi Maali Netta Loogatha, Thunduyingathi Bijarrb May Moodoonuthi, Naomi Hobson, Rosella Namok, Samantha Hobson, Mavis Ngallametta, and Janet Koongotema, each of whom has carved a unique position within the landscape of Australian painting. Since the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, these artists have created works that speak to a profound cultural and spiritual knowledge of landscape, seasonal patterns, and sacred story places, while simultaneously presenting the realities of Indigenous community life.

The artists in this exhibition are defined not by longstanding painting traditions, but by shared geographical conditions, lived experience, and histories of displacement and adaptation. Their paintings carry memory and presence—not an idea of culture, but a lived experience of it. By presenting these women in dialogue for the first time, the exhibition seeks to unpack their individual yet interconnected stories, while exploring their shared creative output and innovation in colour, technique, and style.

On the east coast of Cape York, painting emerged as a new form of creative expression—an outlet through which a younger generation of artists could share their lived experiences while translating cultural narratives passed down by their Elders. 

For Coen and Lockhart River artists Naomi Hobson, Samantha Hobson, and Rosella Namok—who are all cousins—painting offers a glimpse into a life lived in close relationship with the land. These women grew up in the bush, and although they are connected to the same ancestral story places and kinship systems, their art differs greatly in subject matter and iconographic treatment. In Smell of Rain (2024), a new acquisition to the Cairns Art Gallery Collection, Naomi Hobson constructs an abstracted sensory experience, capturing the anticipation of rainfall before the wet season. Samantha Hobson’s Bust ’Im Up (2000), painted when she was nineteen, reflects ongoing issues of violence and alcohol abuse in her community of Lockhart River. 

On the west coast of Cape York, in the community of Aurukun, senior women began formally painting in 2008 with the encouragement and guidance of Gina Allain, the wife of the former Wik and Kugu Arts Centre manager Guy Allain. Among these women were Mavis Ngallametta and Janet Koongotema, who created vibrant interpretations of the landscape, including swamps (pamp), estuaries, and river systems in and around Aurukun. Both artists translated their intricate fibre knowledge—developed through making dilly bags, fishing nets, and pandanus bowls for ceremony and everyday use—into painting. Playing with perspective, their canvases capture the rhythm and movement of the landscape, including its spiritual and ancestral power.

In the Gulf of Carpentaria, senior Kaiadilt women—Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Birrmuyingathi Maali Netta Loogatha, and Thunduyingathi Bijarrb May Moodoonuthi—were part of the first group of seven women painters, alongside Dawn Naranatjil, Paula Paul, Amy Loogatha, and Ethel Thomas, who began painting in 2005. These women rapidly developed a distinctive artistic language that, as Professor Nicholas Evans observed, ‘stemmed from a culture of seeing more than a culture of painting.’¹ Their vibrant, individualistic fields of colour quickly rose to prominence, earning recognition for their bold, intuitive compositions and their ability to translate memory and lived experience into expansive, deeply resonant painterly forms.

Across many of the works in Brush, women continue to foreground ancestral narratives and cultural knowledge, carrying these stories across the surface of the canvas through the rhythm and movement of the brush.

– Shonae Hobson, Curator of Brush: Women Painters