The exhibition Skinship is an exploration of the body as a vessel for memory, resistance, and transformation. Drawing on personal, ancestral, and cultural histories, the exhibition reimagines the body—not merely as flesh and form, but as a site of profound spiritual, ritual, and sacred knowledge.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the body has long been central to cultural expression and transmission. Through dance, song, and sacred mark-making, stories of totemic ancestors and creator beings have been carried across generations for millennia. These embodied traditions are more than art forms; they are acts of deep cultural continuity and spiritual communication.
The exhibition presents works by prominent Far North Queensland-based artists, primarily from the Cairns Art Gallery Collection, whose practices collectively invoke the body as a powerful medium for cultural dialogue and storytelling. From Alair Pambegan’s use of body painting designs and ceremonial markings, to Janet Fieldhouse’s clay forms echoing scarification and adornment practices, and Tony Albert’s conceptual interrogation of the racialised body, Skinship highlights the multiplicity of ways in which the body is imagined, marked, celebrated and contested.
Featuring a selection of paintings, photographs, sculpture, and moving image works, the exhibition weaves a rich tapestry of practices that explore how the body holds, communicates, and transforms cultural knowledge. These diverse mediums engage both the physical and metaphysical dimensions of embodiment, inviting audiences to consider how stories are passed on not only through language, but through movement, rhythm, imagery, and materiality.
Each artwork positions the body as both archive and oracle—a living entity inscribed with ancestral memory, cultural knowledge, and ceremonial power.
In Skinship, the body is not just something we inhabit, but something we listen to—a guide toward healing, connection, and a deeper understanding of our relationship to the world around us.
Hero image:
Naomi HOBSON
Kaantju/Umpila
b. 1978, Coen, Cape York, Queensland
The Grandfather 2020-21
from the January First series
digital print on paper
37 x 56 cm
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Naomi Hobson, 2023
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