Sally Gabori represented Australia in the 55th Venice Biennale of 2013, and her works are held in the permanent collections of the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris; the National Gallery of Australia; all of the Australian state galleries, and others.
11 Facts About Sally Gabori
1.
2.
Sally Gabori gathered food, including shellfish, from the complex system of stone fish traps her people had built in the shallows around the island.
3.
Sally Gabori helped to build and maintain the stone walls of the fish traps, was an adept maker of string, and weaver of dillybags and coolamons, and a respected singer of Kaiadilt songs, which tell of the close ties her people had with their country.
4.
The English name Gabori comes from her husband Pat Gabori, and is a corruption of his birthplace name, Kabararrjingathi.
5.
Sally Gabori did not return with them because her husband was too frail, but was able to visit occasionally.
6.
Sally Gabori was offered paints for the first time at a workshop in April 2005.
7.
The Kaiadilt community had no two-dimensional art traditions before 2005, so Sally Gabori had nothing to draw on but her memory of her country.
8.
When Indigenous Australian artist Melville Escott looked at Sally Gabori's first painting, he could identify "the river, sandbar, ripples the fish leave on the water, her brother King Alfred's country and the fish traps she used to look after".
9.
Towards the end of her career, Sally Gabori painted collaborative works with two of her daughters, and encouraged her other daughters into the art centre, to help develop a new generation of Kaiadilt painters.
10.
Sally Gabori's work has featured in over 28 solo exhibitions and been part of more than 100 group exhibitions.
11.
Sally Gabori's works have been described as abstract expressionism and gestural abstraction, but art theory was not an influence on her work, since Gabori had little English.