ReDot Fine Art Gallery presents the last works by the highly esteemed Paji Wajina Honeychild Yankarr some nine years after her passing in what will fittingly be her first ever solo exhibition.

Honeychild was a founding member of Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in the early nineties and first exhibited work in the exhibition ‘Karrayili’ in Tandanya, Adelaide, 1991. She was also represented in Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993. She instantly gained national recognition and became one of the core group of artists at the art centre who continued to paint and exhibit consistently throughout the 1990s with her domestic appeal soon moving internationally, with a major work eventually exhibiting in the AAMU (Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art) in Utrecht, Netherlands.

She also worked on the two eminent Ngurrara canvases in 1997, which were pivotal in proving the groups connection to country and later led to their successful Ngurrara Native Title Claim.

Her works are blatant records of her desert country with the recurring theme in her works being the Jila (waterhole) of various sites in the Great Sandy Desert which is one of the major ancestral areas for her people. As she stated in 1994, 'I put water in my paintings, places we were walking around' and this was unchanged as her central motif until her passing.

Mangkaja’s then manager beautifully summarises her practice “To watch her paint, there was a sense that she walked around in her paintings, with the broad sweep of the brush, around the places that she walked as a young woman. The waterholes gradually took over the picture plane with the elliptical forms of the centre of the waterhole, bleeding over the edges, reconstructing precisely the view that she would have known as she drew water from the jila.”

This seminal body of work from her estate, aptly titled after her birth place ‘Kurntumarrajarra’, stands testament to an important artist and cultural leader. The inclusion of both early works on paper and her later works on canvas gives depth to her practice and an insight into an artist who’s practice spanned almost twenty years. This wonderful retrospective will forever be revered as the final and only solo exhibition of a pivotal figure in the Aboriginal Art Movement, a fitting finale for a wonderful proponent of the contemporary and modern art movement.

Image: © Paji Wajina Honeychild Yankarr, ReDot Fine Art Gallery