Rosella Namok Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1979 -

Born in 1979, Rosella Namok is an Ungkum speaker who grew up in Lockhart River. In 1999 she burst onto the art scene with a highly successful exhibition in Sydney, which launched both her reputation and that of the Lockhart River Art Gang. She now enjoys a celebrated reputation among national and international art collectors.

Namok’s lands are to the south of Lockhart. Her totem is the Rosella. The artist’s language is the Aankum Group. Rosella began painting as a young girl when helping her father to decorate the bodies of dancers with ochre paints for traditional ceremonies. Her father was the painter of dancer’s bodies for tribal ceremony at Lockhart River and she would often help him smearing clay onto the body and working it with the fingers to create the appropriate designs. The marks or patterns used on the body and on the ceremonial ground are highly symbolic.

These ancestral markings are still strong elements in Rosella’s art today, together with other traditional symbolic patterns learnt from the sand drawing style taught to her by her grandmother. In Rosella Namok’s work we observe both decorative finger painting as well as “scraping” of the surface. “I paint mainly about clan groups, country, family and what people do” says Namok. Other subjects include the seasons – the dry and the wet – and the rainforest. I also paint about the stories people tell me about, the spirits and carnival journeys to other communities.”

Rosella’s work is included in all the major Australian galleries and in some international collections. Her work is often viewed as taking Aboriginal art in a new direction, linking the traditional with the modern. She was ranked among the 50 most Collectable Artists in Australia by Art Collector magazine for 2001 and 2002. In 2013 two of her paintings were used as backdrops to a performance of Stavinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring by the Houston Ballet company in Texas.