Summer Day Burn, 2005, Samantha Hobson
Acrylic on canvas, 185cm x 122cm
Provenance: Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.
Samantha Hobson uses the broad sweeps of paint typical of the young generation of artists from Lockhart River, to create images of Country and the elements of nature in the tropics. One of her subjects is the burning-off season on Cape York. The annual ritual of burning-off all of the rich undergrowth after the wet season is crucial to good all-year hunting and to the safety of this community. Two weeks into the dry season, the undergrowth becomes tinder for big fires. Hobson captures both the danger and spectacle of this dangerous task in vivid images of the fires racing along pristine beaches and leaping into the skies of far north Queensland. (1)
Artist Statement
“When I started… I painted stuff that was happening to me… some things were very bad … I didn’t want to hide it … I wanted to tell people what was happening to me and other young girls in my community. I wanted to show my feelings and my hurt … they were hard, violent paintings … most of them showed the bruises and the blood.”
“I wanted the paintings to say to people in my community ‘You don’t treat young girls like that … they got the right to their life.’ I wanted to tell every person in my community that I’d had enough. I sent these paintings out for Exhibitions … people need to know what’s happening. If you hide it away … no-one knows there’s a problem … so how can they fix it?”