Land and People

The Gallery continues to build its Collection to represent artists who live in or have cultural connections to Country, or who have travelled to Far North Queensland. These artists’ works explore issues of identity and belonging, and the cultural, social, historical and environmental conditions of life in the tropics. 

In the 1970s, one of Australia’s most influential artists, Fred Williams, travelled to the region and created a series of gouaches, which are considered some of his finest work. The Gallery has eight works from the Weipa series, second only to the holdings of the National Gallery of Australia. 

In 2018, the Foundation commissioned Danie Mellor to produce a new work for his exhibition Proximity and Perception, which explored his matrilineal connection to the rainforest south of Cairns. The Collection now has seven significant works by Mellor.

Gallery commissions strengthen the Collection. In 2000 the Gallery commissioned Charles Page to photograph known and more obscure local identities. Renowned artist Vernon Ah Kee grew up in Cairns and in 2017 he was commissioned to create a major portrait of his late father, Merv.

Naomi Hobson is represented in the Collection with photographic portraits commissioned by the Gallery that explore contemporary and traditional culture in remote Indigenous communities. The Adolescent Wonderland series, commissioned in 2019, was later expanded by Hobson leading to a major publication and major exhibitions in Australia and overseas. 

Generating new research informs many of the Gallery’s exhibitions. In 2018 the Gallery commissioned Patricia Piccinini to create a new body of work based on her research of the reef and rainforest environments in the Cairns region. The resulting exhibition in 2019, Life Clings Closest, included a commissioned work No fear of depths that was purchased by the Foundation. 

The 2019 exhibition Queen's Land Blak Portraiture was based on new research and presented archival and contemporary Indigenous portraits by Indigenous artists, to present an alternative reading of the history of British colonisation.

Growing the talent of artists in the region is facilitated through programs such as the Cairns RSL Artists Fellowship initiative that supported artists such as Joel Sam and Tania Major to create new works for their first solo exhibitions at the Gallery. 

Bringing major works to the region enables audiences to access significant artworks relating to the cultural history of the Far North. In 1998, the Gallery presented the landmark exhibition Escape Artists: Modernists in the Tropics that examined the important contribution that artists living and working in the Far North made to Australian art history. 

The Gallery’s 2022 exhibition FACELESS: Transforming Identity, Blak/Black Artists from North Australia, Africa and the African Diaspora, was part of a series of exhibitions that explored cross-cultural dialogues between First Nations artists from around the world as they sought to redefine issues of history, place, culture and traditions.