Gabriella Possum Nungurayi | 'Seven Sisters, 2005' | 140x240cm

Code: DDGP0501

Artist: Gabriella Possum Nungurayi

Title: Seven Sisters

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 140x240cm

Year: 2005

A line of seven concentric circles runs across the centre of the canvas. These are the sisters of the Pleiades, the Napaltjarri women who fled across the sky to escape the unwanted attentions of a hunter. A single circle sits low to the right, set apart from the cluster. The pursuer, or perhaps one sister who fell behind.

Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi inherited the Seven Sisters Dreaming through her mother's country. She has painted this story since childhood, watching her father Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri build the language of dotting that made Western Desert painting famous around the world.

The ground here is worked in countless small dots of deep blue, cobalt and black, with white trails snaking through like watercourses or the milky path of stars. The effect shifts as you move closer. What reads as night sky from a distance becomes a dense topography of ridges and channels. Country and cosmos held in the same field.

The red ochre circles are the only warm notes. They pull the eye along the horizontal procession, then send it down to the lone figure in the lower right. The journey is still in motion.

Gabriella's handling of scale is confident. A canvas this size could easily feel empty in the middle, but the dotwork breathes. There is weather in it. The white veins suggest both lightning and the trails the sisters left as they crossed the heavens, a story she carries forward with quiet authority.