Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s lost country

Contributed by Theodora Bocanegra Lang / Nearly half the paintings included in Kaiadilt artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s first solo show in New York, at Karma in Chelsea, are titled My Country. A few more are called My Father’s Country, and a few others Dibirdibi Country. Though her works are firmly abstract, it is impossible not to think of landscapes and location when viewing them. The artist, whose name is sometimes shortened to Sally Gabori, was born in 1924 on Bentinck Island in Australia, the ancestral homeland of the Kaiadilt people. In 1948, missionaries forcibly displaced Gabori and her people to nearby Mornington Island, where she lived for the rest of her life. She began painting in 2005, when she was about 81, and died a decade later in 2015. While she had not lived on Bentinck Island for nearly 60 years, her work reflects sharp yearning for, and irreparable separation from, her home.

Nearly every painting’s title includes “Country.” Capitalizing the word as many First Nations communities do, she refers not to a politically determined space run by a government but rather to an ancestral homeland that encompasses the land and culture to which a people are spiritually connected. Her paintings thus reveal tender expressions of longing and care, visually describing spaces central to her but from which she has long been isolated. They are heartbreaking – a quality rarely associated with abstract art but clearly realized here.

Painting mostly from memory and association, Gabori conjured the places that were important to her or that she associated with family members. Vibrant, colorful, and full of life and energy, the paintings appear to jump off the walls and almost to glow. While they seem intuitive, unstudied, and quickly rendered, they are also tightly focused. The compositions consist mostly of separate and distinct geometric chunks, like patches on a quilt. The quickness of Gabori’s application occasionally blends the colors together, revealing the shapes of the brushstrokes, which move sharply back and forth or up and down.

Affinities with famous Western abstract expressionists are clear. Gabori’s work reminds me of Willem De Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Franz Kline in the urgency of her mark-making. Another artist who comes to mind, though less obviously, is Etel Adnan. On the abstraction-to-realism spectrum, Adnan falls closer to realism than Gabori, but the similarities are striking. Much of Adnan’s work depicts places from her memories – land features like mountains or the sea from her childhood in Lebanon or her later days in France and California. She reveals devotional connections with these places, painting many of the same scenes again and again, like portraits of loved ones. Gabori likewise paints her subjects with great tenderness, concerned not with visual accuracy but with emotional texture. Some paintings resemble rock formations. Others could allude to islands from aerial views, framed by colorful concentric rings that evoke waves crashing on the shore, or topological maps. Sometimes, I think a horizon line appears, but if I look long enough, I’m not sure anymore. The image is just out of reach.

“Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori,” Karma, 549 West 26th Street, New York, NY. Through April 12, 2025.

About the author: Theodora Bocanegra Lang is a writer from New York. She has an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Oberlin College, both in Art History. She previously worked at Dia Art Foundation and Gavin Brown’s enterprise. You can find her @realtheodora.