Out of the centre

Paddy Bedford Two women looking at the Bedford Downs massacre burning place 2002

This month sees the opening of a major solo exhibition focussing on one of Australia’s most respected artists, Paddy Bedford, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Demonstrating Bedford’s powerful command of painting, the exhibition covers the span of his practice, tracing the development of his motifs and techniques over the past eight years.

Paddy Bedford is a Gija elder from the Warmun region of the north east Kimberley, born around 1922 on Bedford Downs Station. As a senior law man, he has been involved in painting as part of ceremony all his life, although he only began painting for exhibition in 1998 after fellow artist Freddy Timms set up the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art group at Rugun (Crocodile Hole).

Despite his relatively brief career, Bedford’s artistic output has been remarkably prolific and consistently innovative, which is evident in his absolute facility with the medium and his subject matter. He is one of only eight Indigenous Australian artists to have been selected to create a site-specific work for the Quai Branly Museum in Paris and is represented in a number of major Australian and international collections.

Bedford’s body of work is arguably one of the most concentrated and compelling in contemporary Australian painting. He experiments freely with colour, form and pictorial space in his paintings, ranging from his early, densely patterned panels of red, yellow and black ochres, to his recent, expansive canvases in black and white, interspersed by vivid gouaches on paper.

Bedford’s paintings depict the bones of the landscape in which he has spent a lifetime. They combine important family dreamings such as emu, turkey and cockatoo with country he travelled in his days mustering cattle: from hills, creeks, caves and waterholes, to roads, homesteads and stock camps. The paintings often act as visual accounts of oral histories, relating the interaction of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. These histories are conveyed in a beautifully austere and minimal visual language, the elegance of which often masks turbulent or violent events.

Bedford continues and develops the distinctive 'Turkey Creek' or ‘East Kimberley’ style of painting. His expanses of plain ochre ringed by white dots, sparse lines and bold, rounded shapes recall the minimal approach of artists such as Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie and Jack Britten.

The exhibition was originally shown at the Museum of Contemporay Art in Sydney. Following its showing at AGWA, it will be touring to the Bendigo Art Gallery and University Art Museum at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

A major publication accompanies the exhibition, featuring essays by art historian Michiel Dolk and Aboriginal academic and commentator Marcia Langton. It includes the key stories for Bedford’s paintings as recounted by Bedford himself, a Gija glossary, detailed information on the sites in Bedford’s work by Kimberley linguist Frances Kofod, and a detailed index of Bedford’s work since 1998.

David Edwards

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Paddy Bedford

Venue: Art Gallery of Western Australia,
Perth Cultural Centre, Roe Street, Perth
Dates: 12 May-22 July 2007
Cost: Free

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