Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s paintings have been described as a landscape of Australia and Queensland ‘that we haven’t seen before,’ with the artist applying intense, bold colours to the surface of her linen canvases, revealing the environment and life of the tropics. Gabori was born on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, but due to extensive droughts and tidal waves between 1947 and 1848, Methodist missionaries relocated Gabori and her community to Mornington Island where she now lives. Gabori’s large-scale paintings are typified by a bold and expressive application of paint that has invited comparison with the work of American abstract painters such as Clyfford Still. Gabori’s work recounts ancestral stories about particular sites; Bentinck Island and the creation of the land by ancestral beings, the Rock Cod, Crane and Seagull. She was a finalist in the Western Australian Indigenous Art Award and the recipient of an ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award and also included in the Korean Art Fair in 2009. In 2010, she was listed as one of Australia’s most collectable artists in the Australian Art Collector. Her work is held in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, Virginia, South Australia.
