{"product_id":"gabriella-possum-nungurrayi-seven-sisters-2005-140x240cm","title":"Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi | 'Seven Sisters, 2005' | 140x240cm","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCode:\u003c\/strong\u003e DDGP0501\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eArtist:\u003c\/strong\u003e Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTitle:\u003c\/strong\u003e Seven Sisters\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eArea:\u003c\/strong\u003e Alice Springs\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCommunity:\u003c\/strong\u003e Anmatyerre\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 140x240cm\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eYear:\u003c\/strong\u003e 2005\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGabriella Possum Nungurrayi's Seven Sisters paintings carry the story of the Kungkarangkalpa, the ancestral women who fled across the desert from Wati Nyiru and rose into the night sky to become the Pleiades, their pursuer following them as the star in Orion. The story threads together country, waterholes and sky, mapping a chase that stretched for thousands of kilometres into a pattern that can still be read overhead on any clear desert night. It is one of the most widely painted Dreamings across the Western and Central Deserts, and Gabriella returns to it often, each telling a little different from the last.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this large canvas Gabriella brings the story down to the scale of the land itself, working across the whole surface in the close, layered dotting that is the signature of her family's practice. The marks gather and loosen the way the sisters' tracks would across sandhill and claypan, so that the painting reads as both a night sky and a map of the country beneath it. Seen from a distance the surface settles into broad fields of colour; up close it breaks into thousands of individual points, each placed by hand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is a painting that rewards time. The rhythm of the dotting carries the eye across the long format without a fixed centre, in the way the story itself has no single place but runs from waterhole to waterhole until it leaves the ground altogether. For a work of this size that restraint is deliberate: the sisters are present everywhere in the pattern, not pinned to one spot.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGabriella Possum Nungurrayi was born in 1967 at Mt Allan in the Northern Territory, the eldest daughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, one of the founding figures of the Western Desert painting movement. She began painting as a girl under her father's guidance and grew up inside the Anmatyerre traditions that remain the subject of her work: Bush Tucker, Women's Ceremony and the Dreamings of the Serpent, the Goanna and the Seven Sisters. While still a student at Yirara College she won the Alice Springs Art Award in 1985, and in the decades since her father's passing she has developed a style that honours his dotting technique while becoming unmistakably her own, bolder in colour and more open in composition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHer work has been exhibited widely in Australia, the United States and Europe. She designed the Art Tram for the 2014 Melbourne Festival and took part in the Vivid projection programme at the Sydney Opera House in 2016, and her 2008 commission for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, depicting her grandmother's country, was awarded a Gold Medal; a painting from that project was presented to HM Queen Elizabeth II and hangs in the Royal Collection alongside her father's work. Gabriella lives in Melbourne with her family and continues to paint the stories entrusted to her, carrying one of the great lineages of Australian desert painting into the present.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dreamtime Distribution","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67659199873257,"sku":"DDGP0501","price":8800.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0769\/0993\/6873\/files\/DDGP0501-Gabriella_Possum_Nungurayi-2005-Seven_Sisters-140x240cm-square-web.jpg?v=1791688051","url":"https:\/\/cag.art\/products\/gabriella-possum-nungurrayi-seven-sisters-2005-140x240cm","provider":"Canberra Art Gallery","version":"1.0","type":"link"}