WORKS BY LEADING ABORIGINAL, TORRES STRAIT ISLANDERS AND WESTERN AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS

The “Bush Hen Dreaming”, for which Abie Loy Kemarre has custodial rights inherited from her grandfather, was the first story Abie was allowed to paint.

The bush hen, also referred to as a bush turkey or Australian bustard (Ardeotis australis), is Abie’s Dreaming Ancestor, an association commonly erroneously referenced as a ‘totem’.

These paintings refer to women’s sacred ceremonies, including a sacred waterhole site, and narrative elements from the peripatetic habits of the bush hen as it searches for food. The geometry in Abie’s Bush Hen Dreaming compositions is generated from intimate familiarity with the hen, its habitat, and what we would recognise as the science of ethology – the study of animal behaviour. Christine Nicholls describes this as “grounded abstraction”:

“Patterns correspond to the pathways taken by the hen: arcs, semi-circles, and lines, as she engages in the never-ending search for food and attempts to safeguard her chick … constantly beating pathways both toward and away from the chick.”