Artists statement

Gunybi Ganambarr has built a reputation for his innovative techniques, incising and shaping barks and adding materials to traditional art forms. He attributes his confidence in using new materials to his twelve year stint as a part of a building team in remote homelands.

Ganambarr primarily lives in his mother’s community at Gangan, which lies north-west of Blue Mud Bay in eastern Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Ganambarr has absorbed the minutiae and spirituality of place; his paintings can be read as meditations on the specific tracts of land for which he is entitled to speak; in this case, a sacred expanse of water behind the Gangan outstation where this work was produced, referred to as Gulutji.

Ganambarr’s designs recount the ancestral formation of the land, the beings that reside within its borders and
the seasonal events that nourish its ecosystem. His work exemplifies the confidence and cultural assertion of a new, experimental Yolngu art, while remaining firmly influenced by elders and senior artists.

Historical information

Ceremonial hollow log poles
Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

The people of Central and Eastern Arnhem Land refer to themselves collectively as Yolngu, meaning human beings. The Yolngu traditionally use logs naturally hollowed out by termites in a funerary and ceremonial functions, principally as an ossuary. In an Australian contemporary art context however hollow log sculptures are purely memorial in function and made explicitly for public display.

In Arnhem Land hollow logs are known as larrakitj; hollow logs known by other names are used in burial practices by a number of Aboriginal peoples in the north of Australia. The logs can also represent the deceased person, as the designs applied are the same as those painted on the body during the burial rites. All Yolngu clans belong to a moiety, one of two complementary halves of society: Dhuwa and Yirritja. All such affiliations play a part in Aboriginal artists' inherited right to paint an established set of designs belonging to their social group; this inheritance is, in fact, the artist's copyright over imagery.