Judith-Rose Thomas is a palawa artist who features in our On Offer exhibition. She has a life-long interest in the petroglyphs found in northern Tasmania. These have inspired a series of paintings that seek to animate those ancient designs. Here she writes about it:
This one is part of our rock carvings and the other image similar is the other half. I painted the lineal view first and decided to make two paintings from that image. After I put colour in them, the images turned out to be an African woman and an African warrior with a shield. Yet it was conversed through the media that Tasmanian Aboriginal people do not descend from Africa or have any connections. Now the Examiner printed last week there is genetic and scientific proof we did. The work has been done to show there must have been some connection, somewhere down the line. Petroglyphs like this are at Mt Cameron West on the North Western Coast of Tasmania being Aboriginal land with rocks covered in an abundance of petroglyphs belonging to the Tasmanian Aboriginals. The artwork is a modelling compound on MDF board.
You can read about Judith-Rose Thomas in the Examiner.
