Palya: Art From the Desert ~ November 8 – November 30, 2025

In the heart of the remote Ngaanyatjarra Lands of Western Australia, far from the noise of the city, art and everyday life flow together in beautifully grounded ways. PALYA: Art from the Desert brings together works from Papulankutja, a small community of around 160 people whose lives and art are deeply intertwined with Country, story, and place.

This exhibition grows out of my time spent living and working among the artists of Papulankutja between 2011 and 2016, where I witnessed first-hand how painting isn’t just an artistic act – it’s part of daily life. The studio was always alive with laughter, conversation, the smell of acrylic paint, and the rhythm of storytelling. Each canvas carries traces of these moments – layers of memory, knowledge, and connection to land.

What struck me most was how art-making here isn’t a solitary pursuit, nor something separate from community. It’s woven into the social and cultural fabric – part of cooking, talking, caring for family, and passing on stories. The art centre itself feels like a living map of relationships, where stories are painted, shared, and carried forward.

PALYA celebrates these artists and their remarkable creativity, grounded in Country, sustained by community, and expressed through colour, form, and narrative. The works you see here come from a “storied environment”, one where life, art, and land are inseparable.

In the past five decades Australian Aboriginal art has achieved national and international recognition, and has come to occupy a significant space in the Australian cultural environment. The success of Aboriginal art has found its counterpart in a wealth of studies, both by academics in diverse disciplines and museum professionals. My research showed how art production is part of a specific cultural and social context and how it is connected to specific Aboriginal epistemologies. I argue that artmaking needs to be located in the fine-grained relational complexities of everyday life, particularly in the material, social and cultural specifics of daily life in remote Aboriginal communities. My findings demonstrated that art production itself is shown to be fundamentally enmeshed in socio-cultural practices and storied environments.