Nguru: Revisions and Reflections on Aboriginal Art

Nguru: Revisions and Reflections on Aboriginal Art The artists of Yuendumu, with Patrick Waterhouse 10 July – 6 October 2025 across Whitby Museum and Pannett Art Gallery.

Nguru is the Walpiri word for land. This exhibition celebrates the richness and vitality of Australian aboriginal art, its connection not just with the land itself, but also with the origins of that land, and its subsequent, often contested, history.
It also brings aboriginal art, for the first time, to Whitby, the town where Captain Cook – first European to make contact with the eastern coast of Australia and creator of the maps, which opened up the continent for subsequent colonisation – learnt his craft.

The exhibition has been curated by Rebecca Hossack. Her eponymous London gallery was the first to exhibit Australian aboriginal art in Europe, back in 1988, and has continued the commitment to promoting and understanding such work ever since.
The show stands in two, linked and inter-connected, parts. The first presents a carefully selected collection of aboriginal paintings by leading Walpiri artists from the remote Australian desert community of Yuendumu.
These are images, painted in acrylic on canvas, but deploying the millennia-old ‘dot-and-circle’ iconography of the Aboriginal desert peoples. The seemingly-abstract pictures provide both a schematised vision of the land, viewed from above, and a narrative account of its creation during the ‘Dreamtime’.

Antonia Napangardi Michaels, Lappi Lappi Jukurrpa (Lappi Lappi Dreaming), 2022

Alongside these pictures, will be displayed the fruits of an extraordinary collaborative project – titled Revisions – initiated by the acclaimed British conceptual artist Patrick Waterhouse. In 2014 Waterhouse, having travelled to Australia, invited artists from the Yuendumu community to
respond to, and ‘revise’, an archive that he had assembled of old maps, prints, paintings, flags and documents relating to the ‘discovery’ and colonisation of Australia by the British.

The project, which continued over several years, created a host of arresting and thought-provoking images: a stark, almost featureless, antique map is painted over with a rich and significant patterning of traditional designs; the portrait of an aboriginal man is veiled – or ‘restricted’ – with a curtain of ‘dots’; a colonial flag is re-fashioned with new colours; a children’s book illustration of Captain Cook is ‘revised’ by the addition of aboriginal painting.

Margaret Napangardi Lewis, Marissa Napanangka Anderson and Sarah Napurrurla Leo with Patrick Waterhouse, Let’s Go That Way. Restricted with Margaret Napangardi Lewis, Marissa Napanangka Anderson and Sarah Napurrurla Leo, 2016, acrylic paint on archival pigment print on paper, 30.5 x 46 cm

Dorothy Napurrurla Dickson with Patrick Waterhouse, Enough-Enough Picture. Restricted with Dorothy Napurrurla Dickson, 2014-2018, acrylic paint on archival pigment print on paper, 30.3 x 45.5 cm

As an exhibition, Nguru proclaims both the enduring continuities and contemporary vitality of Australian indigenous culture.