Grandmother's Country 1995

Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi made "Grandmother's Country" using a distinct technique: a constellation of tiny dots. I can imagine Nungurrayi patiently building the image from the ground up, one dot at a time. What does this process do for the artist? Maybe the act of dotting slows her down and she can really inhabit the memory, the place, of her Grandmother's Country. It is like a meditation. These aren't the broad brushstrokes of a Western landscape, which tend to capture the bigness of it all. No. Nungurrayi is drawing on something more intimate. Each dot feels like a small memory, a pinpoint of light, and she is binding them together. The painting becomes a place you can get lost in, wandering through a universe of memory. It is a map to somewhere, a guide, that is both inward and outward-looking.