Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford Indigenous Australian (Gija), 1922-2007

According to anthropologist Dr Frances Kofod: ’Janterrji is a place where the artist's family have a small outstation. It is near a water-hole known by Europeans as Dolly Hole. It is an important place where dreamtime women conducted their special ceremonies.’

Dolly Hole refers to a deep waterhole located on Bedford Downs station, south of Warmun in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Like much of the artist's work, this painting sees Bedford bring together his extensive geographical knowledge of the physical landscape - roads, rivers, hills, and stock camps - combined with important ancestral Dreamings that had been passed down to him; stories of the creation of man and animal, spirits, traditions, and the law of the land. For Bedford, painting was as much an expression of country as it was of cultural identity. 

Bedford created a unique aesthetic, juxtaposing bold forms with vast, stark expanses of paint. Produced three years before his death, Dolly Hole sees the artist paring back to a more essential palette of black and white, eliminating his earlier use of ochre hues. Here the contrast of positive and negative spaces is emphasised, but so too is the distinction between striking areas of dense, dark colour and the softened, muted washes of blue and white, suggesting the tension between strength and sensitivity in the artist's own life. 

The subject matter of Bedford’s paintings is drawn from the artist’s two main and very different sources of knowledge and experience. The dramatic Kimberley landscape around Bedford Downs and the historical events that took place there and intersect with the ever present Ngarranggarni or Dreaming, the parallel time dimension where the landscape, animals and plants were created and in which the laws determining behaviour and tradition were established. His paintings also present a dichotomy of viewing, powerful and bold forms, reminiscent of physical features of the Kimberley, are surrounded by expansive delicate washes of muted color, presenting a contrast between powerful physicality and great sensitivity.

Please note that all First Nations Art is created from a so called ‘Birds Eye’ view. This means that the paintings can be hung either horizontally as well as vertically.