Vast swathes of color, like cries or tears: the monumental paintings created by Sally Gabori in the last ten years of her life are a cartography of the heart. Spreading their lagoon blue, lemon yellow, strident orange, and deep white in patches across the canvas, they express the nostalgia for her homeland and the pain of exile. Abstract landscapes in the colors of freedom, brought together for the first time outside Australia, at the Fondation Cartier. A beautiful tribute to the Aboriginal artist who passed away in 2015.
Born into the Kaiadilt Aboriginal community, Sally Gabori – whose tribal name, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda, refers to her totemic ancestor (the dolphin) and her birthplace (Mirdidingki) – was born around 1924 on Bentinck Island, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, in northern Australia (Queensland). Until a cyclone and tsunami in 1948 rendered her native island uninhabitable and forced the last members of this Aboriginal coastal community to migrate to the neighboring island of Mornington (where they would be "herded" and subjected to the assimilationist practices then in place), Sally Gabori was a weaver of dillybags (traditional Aboriginal bags woven from plant fibers used to carry food) and, like most Kaiadilt women, responsible for harvesting shellfish and maintaining the stone fish traps along her island's shores. It wasn't until 2005, when she was over 80 years old, that she began to paint.
Unclassifiable, seemingly sprung from nowhere, her abstract style, unlike any other, is far removed from contemporary Aboriginal art riddled with tiny dots ( dot painting ) scattered in the footsteps of dingoes, lizards, snakes, and other totemic animals crossing desert dunes and riverbeds; far from these symbolic and initiatory landscapes retracing the journeys of the "founding beings" undertaken during the Dreaming, the period of creation, Sally Gabori's paintings are bare, devoid of signs and symbols; only color flows. Spread all over in broad swathes, it even seems to generate forms that layer and interlock to create a kind of giant abstract mosaic. With an astonishing formal freedom, these large swathes of vibrant colors seeming to reflect, as if by ricochets, the light of the sky, the earth and the sea, are in fact a memorial cartography: that of the places dear to the artist, the places of before the exodus… “Here is my land, here is my sea, here is who I am, ” declared the one who likened painting to the “search for the original country” 1.
During the nine years of her artistic career, Sally Gabori painted more than 2,000 canvases – some up to 6 meters long and occasionally collaborative (created with her sisters, nieces, or daughters). These large mosaic-like canvases, with their interwoven shapes outlined in black, evoke the hydrography of her native land, dotted with islets and billabongs (the dead meanders of a river or stream).
An eye familiar with the landscapes of the Gulf of Carpentaria will be able to detect the stylized imprint of the banks of salt land and sandy shores with mangrove-covered banks or fringed with coral reefs; however, it is through the synthetic concretion of water, earth and sky that Sally Gabori traces the paths of the Dreaming: an immaterial space mixing the elements and temporalities (past, present and future) in a quest to understand the world and its creation, according to the aboriginal concept designated by this term Dreaming.
- In the Kayardilt language, the term duljaniji This refers to the nostalgia for one's homeland that is characteristic of exile, the act of "searching for one's homeland".
“Sally Gabori” – Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art
261, bd Raspail, Paris 14th
Until November 6, 2022
