In the paintings of Lucy Ward, each mark upon the canvas is like a fingerprint, betraying the trace of it’s creator’s application. Ward paints her ancestral homelands – the Ngarangarri country – the land of the honey dream. Her marks reveal Ward’s ownership of the country, like footprints upon a landscape that she has traversed by foot, understood instinctively and known intimately. But like a finger or footprint, they exist as the memory of presence, a nostalgic echo of past travels.

In the wake of colonial incursion, Indigenous elders like Ward cannot live upon their traditional lands, but return only occasionally to tend to the lands of which they are the sacred custodians. Returning to her country, Ward sings out to the spirits, warning them of her arrival. Her song echoes through the stony ridges and it is as though she is a young woman again.

It is this memory of the landscape that reveals itself in Ward’s paintings, depicted in effervescent contrasts of reds, whites and greens. Each mark connects Ward to the landscape, making her one with the Dreams, songs and topography of her land of honey. They are what Marcia Langton has described as “site markers of the remembering process and of identity itself” as they inhabit a temporality that is neither past, present nor future, but part of the sacred link that connects Ward to the timeless Ngarranggarni or Dreaming.

Ward’s paintings are a celebration of Kimberley life. Utilising a daring mix of earthy and bright acrylic colours, Ward’s paintings of sugarbags, Wandjina and her traditional country balance a strong formal sense with a playfully idiosyncratic vision.

In 2006 she was awarded the City of Stirling Art Award, with the judges acclaiming her work as “vibrant, happy and lively as well as optically challenging and full of movement.” Ward’s unmistakable style of painting mixes bold and playful compositions with a sense of sacred gravity.

Lucy Ward has been a finalist in some of Australia’s most important art awards, including the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, the Wynne Prize, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, the Redland Art Awards, the Waterhouse Natural History Prize, the Alice Prize and the Fleurieu Biennale. Ward has exhibited throughout Australia, as well as in Asia, Europe and America. Memories of My Country will be Ward’s seventh solo exhibition.

Ward’s works are held in several important public collections, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the WA Museum, the Berndt Museum of Anthropology UWA, and Macquarie University.

Mossenson Galleries is proud to present Memories of My Country: The Art of Lucy Ward, an exhibition from this award-winning senior Kimberley artist.