Teresa Baker | 'Marlilu, 2025' | 91x122cm

firstCode: PPFATB1190

Artist: Teresa Baker

Title: Marlilu

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 91x122cm

Year: 2025

In Marlilu, concentric circles bloom across a field of crimson, ochre and burnt orange, linked by long ribbed pathways that arc and pulse like breath across the canvas. The composition is dense at its heart and loosens toward the edges, where pale dotted halos drift onto cooler ground — as if the country itself is exhaling outward from a central gathering place.

Teresa Baker works within the visual vocabulary of the Western Desert, where the roundel has long served as a marker of place: a waterhole, a campsite, a meeting ground, a site where something happened and continues to happen. Here, the artist clusters these sites into family groupings — three and four roundels fused together like petals — and threads them with the long curving lines that desert painters use to describe travel, tracks and the lines of song that bind one site to the next.

The palette is unmistakably desert: the deep oxide red of weathered stone, the apricot wash of late sun on sand, the bone-white of dotwork laid down in careful, meditative rhythm. Look closely and the surface reveals its labour — each circle built ring by ring from thousands of individual marks, the dotting tightening and loosening to give the forms their breath and weight.

There is a sense of movement across country in this painting. The roundels do not sit isolated; they reach for one another, joined by ribbed conduits that suggest the passage of people, water, or story between sites. Smaller satellite circles in the lower corners read almost like echoes — outlying camps, distant relations, places remembered from afar.

Marlilu is a generous, expansive work: warm in colour, rigorous in pattern, and quietly insistent in the way it maps belonging onto a painted ground. It rewards slow looking, drawing the eye inward to the central cluster and then outward again, following the lines as they fan and disperse into open country.