Lydia Balbal is from an Aboriginal community called Bidyadanga, on Lagrange Bay which was discovered in 1802 by French navigator Nicholas Baudin and named after a French mathematician in the Prussian Court. How interesting that this Mangala woman is now exhibiting her beautiful paintings in Paris.
Lydia’s traditional country is near Punmu in the Great Sandy Desert of W.A. Her family walked out to the coastal town of Bidyadanga,200kms south of Broome, in 1974, when Lydia was 18. This group were the last of the “first contact” people left in Australia. Bidyadanga was officially created by the establishment of La Grange Mission in 1955 although it was settled around 1889 when a telegraph station was built at La Grange Bay. It is the largest remote Aboriginal community in Western Australia with a population of approximately 750 residents and is home to the Karajarri, Juwalinny, Mangala, Nyungamarta and Yulpartja language groups. The recognised traditional owners of the land are the Karajarri people. The word Bidyadanga comes from a word for “emu watering hole” (pijarta or bidyada).
Lydia is a still very much a bush woman. She is a prolific hunter and can catch, skin, and cook a king brown snake with her bare hands.
Lydia first began painting in 2007. Her bold colourful works track her story of migration from her traditional desert country to the coast and record her ongoing deep connection to her traditional country. It is said that the first time Lydia painted Pikarong, her birthplace, a king brown snake appeared at the Bungalow (the painting studio in Broome where the Yulparija Artists work).
The linear elements in Lydia’s work represent both the underground creeks that traverse the Great Sandy Desert as well as walking and hunting tracks. The creeks and rivers feed the water holes that sustained Lydia Balbal’s people for tens of thousands of years. The Mangali word for these is “piti”. Lydia overlays these symbolic waterways and tracks with her signature flickering dot style. The dots merge in sections creating a complex spatial vortex, swirling veils that hover and shift over the subterranean architecture of the work.
Lydia is a dynamic painter and amazing colourist. She is receiving significant attention from collectors and the media and her current show in Paris is her very first solo show outside Australia.
Parallel spaces celebrate the art of significant female artists from Martumili to Bidyadanga (represented by Jan Billycan and the late Weaver Jack) and on to Yirrkala in Arnhemland with a tribute to the late Gulumbu Yunupingu.
Catherine Hickson, Assistant Curator