Deutscher and Hackett

Dolly Hole refers to a deep waterhole located on Bedford Downs station, south of Warmun in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Like much of the artist's work, our painting sees Bedford bring together his extensive geographical knowledge of the physical landscape - roads, rivers, hills, and stock camps - combined with important ancestral Dreamings that had been passed down to him; stories of the creation of man and animal, spirits, traditions, and the law of the land. For Bedford, painting was as much an expression of country as it was of cultural identity.

Bedford created a unique aesthetic, juxtaposing bold forms with vast, stark expanses of paint. Produced the year before his death, Dolly Hole sees the artist paring back to a more essential palette of black and white, eliminating his earlier use of ochre hues. Here the contrast of positive and negative spaces is emphasised, but so too is the distinction between striking areas of dense, dark colour and the softened, muted washes of blue and white, suggesting the tension between strength and sensitivity in the artist's own life.

LEAH CROSSMAN