Description

Details

• Type: Screen print
• Edition: 99
• Paper: Black BFK
• Size: 545 x 740 mm (image) and 570 x 760 mm (paper)
• Printer: Gilbert Herrada, Northern Editions Darwin, NT, November 1999

Story

In the last 40 years the country on Lissadell Station has undergone massive destruction on two counts. It is now partly under the water of Lake Argyle formed by the damming of the Ord River and it is also the location of the Argyle Diamond Mine which has demolished an entire Dreaming place. Most of Goody’s pictures depict her Dreaming (ancestral creation stories) and places where she walked in the bush on Lissadell when she was a child. Because of the impact of the mine on country, she often paints Dreamings associated with that area. In this print we see three Dreamtime women who were fishing for barramundi by pushing a wall of spinifex down a creek. The barramundi got away and jumped right over the ranges north of the mine leaving its scales there to become diamonds. The women went down and stood at the edge of the water at a place called Wawinyin or Cattle Creek Rockhole on the Bow River south of the mine. They turned to stone and you can still see them sanding ner the waterhole there today.

Goody Barrett Artist Biography

Goody was a senior Gija woman who was born on Lissadell Station to the north of Turkey Creek in the East Kimberley in Western Australia c1930. Her Gija name was Lilwayi and her skin name is Nyawurru. She continued to live at Turkey Creek and was inspired to paint by Hector Jandany and Rover Thomas. She was a member of Warmun Artists.

Goody had a tremendous capacity for formal invention and a distinctive treatment of the familiar landforms in her country.

Individual Exhibitions

• 1999 Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
• 2001 Short Street Gallery, Broome
• 2001 Chapel off Chapel Gallery, Melbourne
• 2002 Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide
• 2002 Tandanya, Adelaide
• 2003 Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne

Her artwork is held by AGNSW.