http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/up-north-rosella-namok/2006/01/20/1137553760019.

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Up North: Rosella Namok

By Patrick Hutchings
January 20, 2006

Namok's big, eloquent paintings have depth and spirit.

Rosella Namok's Neap tide night fishing.

Genre
Painting and Drawing
Location
Niagara Galleries
Address
245 Punt Road, Richmond North
Date
10 January 2006 to 28 January 2006
Phone Bookings
(03) 9429 3666

Rosella Namok is an abstract artist working beside the Lockhart River within an Aboriginal
culture. She attended a TAFE - briefly - and says: "After that I became more abstract."

Before, her themes were totemic, but her abstract notations, the finger-gouged chevrons, and the
square spirals, are not without reference. The chevrons are neap-tide tide-marks. The sections, as
if of a cube-shaped nautilus shell, are houses. The spiral is a simplified model of the maze-
journey one must take to get to the heart of any family.

The scratching through paint surfaces, the building up of impasto, are perception and instinct
caught in a moment of making; gestures. Perspectives shift: on a painting with a "Western"
horizon, a fish-shaped "fishing hole" appears in bird's-eye view. Soft Rain is almost Streeton
revisited but remains unmistakably Aboriginal.
A deco-looking Yiipay Kungkay - Claudie and Quintel mouths, has two quartered circles fluently
and irrevocably scratched in, along with lively vertical and horizontal lines, and represents two
rivers, and marks in sand.

Rex Butler raised an interesting issue in his essay Rosella Namok's post-Aboriginal Art
(Australian Art Collector, 21, 2002) but it seems premature to see Namok as post-Aboriginal.
To non-Aborigines, much Aboriginal art needs must be read as abstraction. Even given the story,
we never get it. Namok's abstractions remain referential to the shapes and weathers of her locale.

The very big, very eloquent paintings in Up North smell not of the TAFE studio, but of sea,
sand, water, tides. Go see for yourself, and you may be as good a judge as any.

Lockhart River Art Centre coordinator Sue Ryan says: "Ordinary visitors to the centre don't have
to understand, they just get it - depth, spirit, passion. And they always want the pictures we are
saving for exhibitions."

Rosella Namok has depth and sprit. But as the proverb puts it: the image has the last word.

For more about the Lockhart River Gang: http://www.artgang.com.au/artist_rosella.html