Home: Aboriginal art from New South Wales

The artworks in this section are created using materials sourced from Country, such as natural materials collected on the artist’s own country or found materials collected from locations of importance. The works engage with histories of country, ideas of land use, and notions of place through an Aboriginal lens.

Esme Timbery
born 1931
Eora/Bidjigal, South-east region

Bidjigal artist and elder Esme Timbery comes from a long line of shell workers from the Aboriginal mission community of La Perouse in Sydney. Timbery, like other La Perouse shell artists, creates contemporary sculptural forms using designs and patterns that are inherited and continued, with individual family styles recognised and understood. The subjects and objects embraced by the La Perouse artists speak to the region’s cultural realities and connection to country: the Sydney Harbour Bridge represents Aboriginal peoples’ ability to transcend boundaries, and its shelled manifestation provides a richer, alternative understanding of the Sydney landscape.

Euraba Artists and Papermakers
Elenore Binge, born 1975
Leonie Binge, born 1966
Margaret Dennison, born 1961
Adrienne Duncan, born 1955
Joy Duncan, born 1941
Margaret Duncan, born 1960
Marlena Hinch, born 1982
Marlene Hinch, born 1948
May Hinch, born 1946
Jenny McIntosh, born 1948
Stella O’Halloran, born 1944
Isobel Karkoe, 1941–2003
Gloria Woodbridge, born 1948
Kamilaroi, Boggabilla, Northern Riverine region

The strength of women was central to the establishment of Euraba Artists and Papermakers in 1998, by nine Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) women from Boggabilla and Toomelah in northern NSW. The collective takes its name from the eura bush, a native medicinal plant used for healing. Euraba paper is mostly made using cotton-rag offcuts. Ironically, cotton is one of the primary industries on Kamilaroi country, and has played a part in the dispossession of Traditional Owners and the degradation of the region’s environment. By working with cotton-rag offcuts, produced on their country, the artists challenge the region’s history of dispossession and continue to work and engage with their country.

Jonathan Jones
born 1978
Wiradjuri, Southern Riverine region, Kamilaroi, Northern Riverine region, Sydney, South-east region

Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones works across a range of mediums, from printmaking and drawing to sculpture and film. He creates site-specific installations and interventions into space that use light, subtle shadow and the repetition of shape and materiality to explore Indigenous practices, relationships and ideas. Jones often works with everyday materials to explore relationships between community and the individual, the personal and public, historical and contemporary. At the heart of Jones’ practice is the act of collaborating, and many projects have seen him work in conjunction with other artists and communities to develop outcomes that acknowledge local knowledge systems to connect particular sites with local concerns.

Karla Dickens
born 1967
Wiradjuri, Southern Riverine region, Lismore, South-east region

Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens creates installations and collage-based works that consider a range of collective and personal experiences, ideas and traditions. Dickens works with fabric, beads and found objects, layering these with text and paint. This array of materials, textures and layers talks to the many theories and emotions she brings together, including Aboriginality, religious iconography, feminism and motherhood, mirroring and connecting to the different aspects of her own life. This use of art materials grew not only out of financial necessity but also out of Dickens’s obsession with memory, the past and the shadow. The cycle of life and death and the return to the foundational ‘mother’, the creator, is an ever-present theme in her work.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey
born 1962
Wiradjuri, Culcairn, Southern Riverine region

Lorraine Connelly-Northey works with rusted barbed wire, rabbit and chicken fencing, combined with corrugated iron, tin and other odds-and-ends salvaged from tips and dumps, to create traditional Koori (south-east) forms, such as narrbongs (string bags). Her works speak to her direct experiences of being displaced from her ancestral country, being of mixed Aboriginal and Irish descent, and living in a rural and post-colonial environment. Connelly-Northey’s work also conjures the composite construction of Aboriginal fringe camps and mission homes that were made from corrugated iron and tin cut and flattened into sheets and lined with newspaper for insulation. For the artist, the process of recontextualising decaying machine-made rural materials into Aboriginal forms reveals enduring traditions.

Mum was born and raised on the banks of freshwater rivers, in shanties constructed out of discarded scraps of rusty tin and iron, living off the land, its waterways and government handouts. Mum recalls the dangers of these rivers, the lives lost and the unexplained sightings of their unknown creatures. Dad would take me out bush and teach me what he had learnt about Mum’s culture and about the bush. He taught me about the river, its tributaries, lake systems, Aboriginal sites and artefacts, nature, animals and plants, how to read rain clouds and the many aspects of water irrigation taught to him by his farming father.

— Lorraine Connelly-Northey, 2012

Phyllis Stewart
born 1954
Tharawal, Gerringong, South-east region

Phyllis Stewart was born on her Tharawal (Dharawal) lands on the South Coast of NSW. Stewart has a family connection to La Perouse in Sydney, like many Aboriginal people from the South Coast, and as a young girl her family was constantly on the move, undertaking itinerant work. Stewart learned the art of shell work from a young age and has since become a master weaver. Her weaving practice involves the collection and maintenance of native grasses, reeds, vines and bark, reflecting Stewart’s ongoing cultural engagement and creative connection with country.

Materials from Country artset