Bidi Karta Werda (Path across)
2018
- Medium
- oil, resin and earth pigments on canvas
- Measurements
- 170.0 × 290.0 cm
- Accession Number
- 2019.202
- Department
- First Nations Australia
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
© Courtesy of the artist - Gallery location
- Not on display
- About this work
-
Bidi Karta Werda (Path across) includes irregular sections of Balga resin, symbolic of the artist’s Nyoongar identity. The large-scale painting is a reinterpretation of a nineteenth-century panorama on paper made by European explorer Robert Dale in 1834. Christopher Pease’s work is painted in a figurative style, which is modelled on early colonial engravings. His painted ‘colonial’ views of the Swan River area reference the work made by settler artists encountering unfamiliar lands. Pease, however, has overlaid his landscape with symbols associated with European science and colonial expansion, as well as references to ancestral beings and Indigenous spiritual frameworks that are embodied in traditional custodianship of Country.