My Life’ by Maggie Green of Spinifex Hill Studio is a collection of 13 radiant artworks that tell the stories and geography of the artist’s childhood.
Now based in the Pilbara, a remote region in the North of Western Australia, Maggie grew up with her family at Myroodah Station, a sheep and cattle station in the West Kimberley Region. ‘[I was] born on station, Myroodah Station, Derby side. My mother and father, granddad, grandmother, uncles, aunties, we all been grew up there. I been going to school there,’ she reflects. Maggie speaks of camping in rivers every weekend and life with her family, ‘Mum Dad, two brother, three sister, all grew up on the station. My brother been learn us for hunting. My mum’s learned us to catch turtles’.
Myroodah Station is where Maggie lived, went to school, worked and first started to paint. She learned her distinctive dot painting style from her mother and grandmother. ‘We start doing painting on Myroodah Station’, Maggie explains. ‘My mum and my grandmother teaching us doing painting for us. That’s how we were learning dot paint.’
Created from densely-layered fields of coloured dot work, Maggie’s canvases are semi-abstract renderings of landscape. Separating colour-blocked shapes with organic, fluid lines, she creates scenery tinged with emotion, memory and texture in vivid hues and pastel shades.
Maggie paints in two layers of gridded dots. She begins by sketching out the same thing on every canvas, two lines drawn down the centre in chalk representing the road at Myroodah Station where she grew up. She then draws two squares on either side of the road; the school and the toilet block. She layers dense fields of coloured dot work over the original design, obscuring the neat footprint with vibrant palettes, intuitive shapes and heavy textures. But underneath every painting is the same design: the road and two buildings where she grew up.
‘That’s the road,’ Maggie explains, directing her finger to the centre of the canvas. ‘This is the house,’ she says, pointing to a section of the painting adjacent to the road, mapping out the area she once called home.
We’re so honoured to be presenting this show at TDF Collect and hope that you will join us for the exhibition opening on Saturday November 27th to see these works in all their glory! We’ll be having drinks to celebrate from 2pm that day.
Thank you so much to our exhibition sponsors: Minimum Wines, Bodriggy, Capi and Dulux, to Sophia and Fiona from Spinifex Hill Studio for helping us bring this show to life, and to Mark and the Chapman & Bailey team for their support!
Pre-sales for ‘My Life’ by Maggie Green open at 7am this morning (Tuesday November 16th) – first come, first served!
Check out the full catalogue here and email art@thedesignfiles.net for sales and inquiries.
‘My Life’ by Maggie Green
Saturday November 27th – Thursday December 2nd
Exhibition opening Saturday November 27th, drinks from 2pm
Featuring a botanical installation by Alchemy Orange
Saturday – 10am – 4pm
Sunday – 11am – 4pm
Monday – Closed
Tuesday – Thursday, 10am – 3pm
TDF Collect
14 Little Oxford Street
Collingwood, Victoria
