Mavis Ngallametta: Show Me The Way To Go Home

Mavis Ngallametta: Show Me The Way To Go Home is a major exhibition honouring the life and work of the late Aurukun artist Mavis Ngallametta (1944–2019), showing at the Queensland Art Gallery until February 7th, 2021.

The first extensive survey of Ngallametta’s work features more than 40 paintings and sculptures of her and her adopted son, Edgar Kerindun’s Country in and around Aurukun in Far North Queensland. 

Mavis Ngallametta was one of the most well-regarded senior community-based artists in Australia, and made a profound contribution to arts and culture nationally before her passing last year.

This excellent exhibition charts the artist's creative output from the moment she took up painting in 2008 at aged 64, through to works created just prior to her passing in 2019.

Prior to picking up a paint brush, Ngallametta was a renowned weaver and this exhibition includes examples of her ghost net weaving, as well as her earliest forays into acrylic painting; bold, celebratory, small-scale works depicting Country in its post-wet season abundance with swamps teaming with brightly coloured waterlilies.   

Throughout her career, Ngallametta created works that spoke to the most important places in her life, and while she was the traditional owner of many of the places she painted, other landscapes were inspired by personal, familial or cultural connections.

Show Me The Way To Go Home features extraordinary large-scale canvases depicting Ikalath, a site known for its dramatic red dirt cliffs and sacred white clay north of Aurukun; and paintings that capture Ngallametta’s strong connection to Wutan, a site west of Aurukun and the Country of her adopted son Edgar. 

Also featured are the artist's painted memories of Country around the Kendall River and Yalgamunken, the local site for collecting yellow ochre near Aurukun; and the Pamp (swamp) series depicting the life-filled lagoons that ring the community of Aurukun.

According to QAGOMA’s former Curator of Indigenous Australian Art, Bruce Johnson McLean, all of Ngallametta's paintings are about place - the stories she knew, the memories she held and the people she loved. Each painting is about her home, and in her painting, she found a new home - somewhere she could go to remember, relive and record places, memories and loved ones.

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