Paddy Bedford

(circa 1922-2007)

Untitled (Old Bedford), 1998

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Purchased from Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia in April 2000
The Laverty Collection, Sydney

LITERATURE:
Linda Michael (ed.), Paddy Bedford, exh. cat., Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006, p.143 (illus.)

Untitled (Old Bedford), 1998, is the fifth painting
catalogued in the first year Nyunkuny commenced
painting in the public arena through Jirrawun Arts.
The title of the work refers to the original building
constructed of Spinifex and paperbark, on Bedford
Station, south of the present homestead. It is country
that belongs to Nyunkuny's uncles and aunts and
known by the Gija name Doowoonan. The painting
on hardboard reflects the influence of Rover Thomas,
who passed away in the same year this was created: the
physical and visual tactility of the natural ochres, the
articulation of forms defined by lines of white dotting
which appear to float across the canvas yet are firmly
anchored in place by the composition, are elements
reminiscent of Thomas' work.

Wally Caruana

PADDY BEDFORD
Paddy Bedford (Nyunkuny) was born into a 'world
of violence' (Langton, M., 'Goowoomji's World' in
Michael, L. (ed.), Paddy Bedford, Sydney: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2006, p.53), at Ngarrmaliny on
Bedford Downs cattle station in the eastern Kimberley,
where a number of his Gija relatives were massacred
for killing a bullock near Kananganja (Mount King) a
few years previously. Nonetheless he grew up to lead an
active ceremonial life while working as a stockman on
Bedford, old Greenvale and Bow River Stations. Paddy
Bedford began to paint for the public in his seventies
when he joined Freddie Timms as a founding member
of the Jirrawun Arts collective, established in 1998 to
protect the rights of a group of east Kimberley artists.
He was no overnight success; Nyunkuny's mastery of
painting on canvas owed much to years of ritual activity,
and he was soon hailed as the 'new Rover Thomas'
(Koford, F., in Kleinert, S. and M. Neal (eds), The Oxford
Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 2000, p.540).

Paddy Bedford participated in several major exhibitions,
including the seminal Blood on the Spinifex exhibition
at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of
Melbourne, in 2002-3, about the violent times suffered
by previous generations of Gija, and True Stories: Art of
the East Kimberley at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
in 2003. He was selected as one of eight Aboriginal
artists to contribute designs for the buildings of the
Musée du quai Branly, Paris, that opened in 2006.
Later that year he was honoured with a retrospective
exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In
2012 his work was included in Ancestral Modern: Australian
Aboriginal Art: Kaplan & Levi Collection, at the Seattle Art
Museum, USA.

Wally Caruana