376-26UA, Pauline Lewis Parrott, Acrylic on Belgium Linen, 150 x 150 cm, $2,900
Pauline's linear and geometric paintings are largely intuitive, improvised, singular works animated by her embodiment of Indigenous cosmology woven into contemporary settler-colonial life. Her cultural influences range from mindfulness meditation, her dreams, Catholic prayer or her Youtube playlists playing in the studio employed as creative impulses to channel ancestral lore, everyday observations of modern living and a complex of deeply felt emotions spanning immense grief to joyous memorial.
Moreover, these formal improvisations fertilise the canvas for surreal imagery to grow. Figures, landscapes and symbols appear organically within these patterned fields, as though tearing or moulding alternate dimensions through a temporal present. Two works in this exhibition exemplify these visions, one taking the form of a nocturnal sky scattered with moon and stars, and another cornering the sensual décolletage of Country adorned in red-ochre jewellery.
WONAMBI LINES thematically brackets Pauline’s loose style with her family's totem Wonambi, the Rainbow Serpent, passed down through her paternal grandfather, Jack Parrott. Originally from Kata Tjuta, the place of many heads near Uluru, Jack was renowned as both a rainmaker and healer. He later lived and worked at Annandale Station while living in Oodnadatta, where his son Tommy, Pauline's father, was born.
Within Pauline's family, the gift of ngangkari (traditional healer) is customarily passed to the eldest grandson. Yet Pauline inherited aspects of this knowledge directly from her father and grandfather. During her childhood, Jack would take her on unexpected journeys across Country, often to keep her hidden from Welfare authorities. It was through these travels, and through time spent listening, watching and learning, that Pauline received healer teachings and bush knowledge that continue to inform both her life and her art today.
According to Pauline, there are many Wonambi, authoring interconnected creation stories of the lands, skies and waters. The paintings in this exhibition express the various worlds and environments carved out by this Creator-Being’s serpentine movements, tracing the psychic and physical pathways of Wonambi as a force that simultaneously shapes and is shaped by Country, that Pauline Lewis Parrott, is the custodian of.
