DOLLY HOLE, 2006

Important Aboriginal Art
Melbourne
26 March 2014
82

PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD

(c.1922 - 2007)
DOLLY HOLE, 2006

natural earth pigments with synthetic binder on linen

122.0 x 135.0 cm

inscribed verso: Jirrawun Aboriginal
Arts cat. PB 5 2006.252

Private sale
Provenance

Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts Corporation, Kununurra
Private collection, Melbourne

Literature

Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 159 (illus.)

Catalogue text

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, our 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 the year 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.

LEAH CROSSMAN