Revealed, various artists
Fremantle Arts Centre

Packed, as always, with works from new and emerging artists, the 2023 Revealed exhibition ignites a fire in your liyarn (spirit) by inviting you to view Country through an Aboriginal lens.

This year’s iteration of Revealed features more than 200 works by over 100 Aboriginal artists from all over Western Australia and beyond, selected by a panel that included Ron Bradfield (Bardi Peoples), Sharyn Egan (Whadjuk Nyoongar Peoples), Jessyca Hutchens (Palyku Peoples) and Glenn Iseger-Pilkington (Nhanda & Nyoongar Peoples) – also the exhibition’s curator.

Entering the gallery from the south door, you are greeted by Ballardong Noongar artist Enid Kickett’s work Enimo (2022-23), a series of numerous immaculately and intricately painted paper plates that make Country come alive before your eyes. The plate rims form perfect frames, in colours that pop against the landscapes contained within, reminding the viewer of the wonders of Country throughout the seasons.

As you walk into the Wardong Gallery, the room comes alive with an impressive range of works. There is something particularly moving about the wooden painted sculptures by Ngaanyatjarra artists Cynthia Burke and Lena Dawson. These two artists use Country as a canvas, gently and carefully guiding and shaping pieces of tree trunk and branches, as Elders have done so lovingly throughout the generations. In her didactic panel, Burke speaks about the way trees look after us, and of the reciprocal relationships we – as Aboriginal people – have always had.

Browsing the Wardong Gallery, Yindjibarndi/Kariyarra artist Sharon Warrie’s glass works caught my eye, glimmering in the sun streaming in from the nearby window. Making work about dreamtime stories and ochre used in ceremony, Warrie captures the vivid colours of both in her jewel-bright sculptures.

Just 18 years old and self-taught, Ava Christopher is a Yindjibarndi woman whose duo of boldly coloured acrylic paintings of two angled figures dancing – one by day, the other by night – left me in awe. Titled Dreamtime Dancing (2023), both works emanate heat; you can feel the embers from the fire in one, while the red earth radiates in the other.

Eerie colours give a ghostly feel to the Country depicted in Tree down by the stream in Gosnells (2023), an acrylic painting by Noongar/Yamaji Wadjari Elder Valerie Woods. It feels as if the Country is holding the essence of the Elders that walked before them. The texture of the paperbark Woods has used lures the viewer closer, to see details that may be missed from afar.

Created by an artist credited as “Nyungar Artist”, Always was Always will Be Nyungar Boodjar (2023) is an acrylic on canvas work with a ghostly feel (pictured top). The depiction of an almost transparent figure against the forefront of a neo-modernist cityscape that glows in shades of fiery orangey-red seems to be reminding us that the spirit of this Country is alive and strong, no matter what the current climate is.

Beautifully positioned in the main foyer, Waangkan/Talk (2023) – a painted site-specific mural containing four works on canvas, by internationally renowned Whadjuk, Ballardong and Arrernte artist JD Penangke – feels like the perfect way to bookend Revealed. Bold and striking, the work is a map depicting the Derbal Yerrigan as the life force for Country, a bright blue ribbon snaking across the landscape. Penangke says Waangkan/Talk speaks to “the importance of [women’s] voices in our community locally and nationally.”

With so many works on display, offering an intoxicating array of perspectives and stories, the 2023 Revealed exhibition will sustain you over multiple visits.

Revealed continues at Fremantle Arts Centre until 23 July 2023.

Pictured top: Nyungar Artist, ‘Always Was Always Will Be Nyungar Boodjar’, 2023, acrylic on canvas. Photo supplied