Aunty Zeta Thomson is a respected Elder and descendant of the Yarra Yarra Clan of the Wurundjeri people through her father and grandfather, Alexander Briggs, and is a descendant of the Ulupna Clan of the Yorta Yorta people on her mother and grandmother, Teresa (Yarmuk) Clements. She is a renowned artist, culture teacher and advocate for the rights of Aboriginal prisoners in Victoria. Aunty Zeta retains strong connections to her ancestral homelands. Her parents participated in the historic Cummeragunja Walk-Off, relocating to the Shepparton-Mooroopna. Her family maintains links with Cummeragunja through the continuing use of ancestral burial grounds. Her knowledge of culture has been passed down by her mother and father and maternal grandmother. 
Aunty Zeta and her husband, Edward have been proudly for married 54 years. She is a mother of three children and a grandmother of ten. She has had a lifetime involvement in Aboriginal affairs, working at a community level, like many of her family members. She has supported land rights and Aboriginal rights with her family. Aunty Zeta was the first Victorian Aboriginal artist to have work exhibited at Melbourne Museum’s Bunjilaka Gallery. Her paintings are inspired by the family stories and her work showcases the Yorta Yorta creation story: “Aboriginal art is storytelling; it is inspired by old creation stories”.

Cairns-based artist Brian Robinson creates an intricate and inventive aesthetic which has helped expand popular understandings of what Indigenous art can be. With his ability to meld contemporary influences and cultural knowledge he has developed a dynamic aesthetic. His graphic prints and sculptures are known to draw you into with a constellation of details. Once you’re there, they can read as episodes in a dense traditional narrative, while disorientation and surprise flickers from the edges of your perception. 
Brian has brought awareness of Indigenous culture and heritage to the broader Australian population through his many public art commissions and his work is held in major collections including National Gallery of Australia; the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; National Gallery of Victoria; the Australian National Maritime Museum; the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Virginia, USA.
Kala Lagaw Ya and Wuthathi language groups of the Torres Strait Islands his ancestral lineage extends back to the Maluyligal people from the Western Islands of Torres Strait and the Wuthathi people from the silicon sand dunes at Shelburne Bay on the eastern side of Cape York Peninsula.

Dylan Mooney is a proud Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man from Mackay in North Queensland. Armed with a rich cultural upbringing Mooney is influenced by history, culture and family and responds to community stories, current affairs and social media. Legally blind, his digital medium’s backlit display allows the artist to produce a high-impact illustrative style with bright, saturated colour that reflects his experiences. 
Working across painting, printmaking, digital illustration and drawing, he rethinks what digital technologies and artistic practices can say about identity, desire and representation. Known for buoyant optimism and sharp social commentary, he&#39;s particularly interested the voices that tend to get left out. And his work has helped shift the representation of queer love among people of colour.

Hayley Millar Baker is a First Nations Gunditjmara artist, born in Naarm/Melbourne. Through examining the role our identities play in translating and conveying our experiences, Hayley works across photography, collage, and film to interrogate and abstract autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity. Her oblique storytelling methods encourage us to embrace that the passage of identity, culture, and memory are not linear nor fixed. 
Miller Baker’s works are held in significant public institutional collections across Australia and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Miller Baker was selected as one of eight artists to exhibit in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera: Young Australian Artists (2018) and has been awarded several residencies including the Artist-in-residence at Monash University Prato, Italy (2022), the First Nations Residency at Collingwood Yards (2021), the Photography Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2019). Hayley was a feature artist in PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography (2021).

John Prince Siddon is the son of Pompey Siddon, who was one of the founding painters at Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency in Fitzroy Crossing W.A in 1991. A Walmajarri man, he was born in 1964 in Derby, and spent his early years working on cattle stations until injured in a horse-riding accident and now based in Fitzroy Crossing with his wife and son. Moving between two and three-dimensional space, Prince’s celebrated paintings cast his own story within desert iconography, depictions of the Narrangkarni (Ancestral stories) and televised images of national and global issues. 
Siddon’s practice reveals themes ranging from colonisation and immigration and their effects on native flora, fauna and Aboriginal communities through to First People’s land management, global warming, and the regeneration of bush. February 2020 saw John Prince Siddon commissioned for his first major solo show by the Perth International Festival with “All Mixed Up”. A survey of works that demonstrated Prince’s adeptness for pushing mediums on multiple surfaces and rendering imagery that reflects a unique take on today’s national political and social issues.

Born in Mundubbera, Queensland, Judy Watson&#39;s Aboriginal matrilineal family is from Waanyi country in northwest Queensland. Watson’s process evolves by working from site and memory, revealing Indigenous histories, and following lines of emotional and physical topography that centre on particular places and moments in time.
Exhibiting extensively since the 1980s, Watson co-represented Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Her work is held in major Australian and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia; all Australian state galleries; MCA/Tate Modern, London; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; St Louis Art Museum, USA; British Museum, London; Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, England; Library of Congress, Washington, USA; and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, USA. Significant solo exhibitions have been held recently at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England, 2020; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2021.

Join Julie Gough in conversation with Kimberley Moutlon on 4pm, Friday 7 July. <a href="https://rising.melbourne/festival-program/shadow-spirit-in-conversation-with-julie-gough">Find out more</a>.
Julie Gough is an installation, sound and video artist and writer. She is also a curator of First People’s Art and Culture at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. She is a Trawlwoolway woman whose Briggs-Johnson-Gower family have lived in the Latrobe region of North West Tasmania since the 1840s, with Tebrikunna their Traditional Country in far northeastern Lutruwita (Tasmania). 
Gough’s research and art practice involves uncovering and re-presenting subsumed and often conflicting histories, and frequently draws on her own and her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people. She holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania (2001) and an MA University of London, Goldsmith College (1998). 
Since 1994 Julie has exhibited in more than 130 exhibitions and her work is held in most state and national collections in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of West Australia, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and National Museum of Australia.

Karla Dickens is Wiradjuri. Born in Sydney in 1967, the same year as the historic Referendum recognising the existence of Aboriginal people in their own country, known as Australia. Dickens’ process of self-discovery, expressed through both hardship and humour, was also a journey to understanding her Aboriginal heritage life. 
A careful collector of racially and sexually charged memorabilia, and other found objects, Dickens is a caretaker over material cultures that haunt. Primarily her works investigate her own intersected identities of being Aboriginal, gay and a single mother. Dickens has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and abroad since the early 1990s and her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia, Australian National Maritime Museum, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Sydney, Artspace Mackay and Bendigo Art Gallery.

“In my community and for First Peoples across Australia we hold stories of spirits and other worldly beings that heed both warning and protection. 
Across our lands there are accounts of Ancestral creatures that have created the rivers and mountains, that swim in the oceans and protect waters ways and there are tales of beings that entrap minds and children or lead you astray causing you mischief. There are stories of beings that bring new life of babies and protection of country that guide you in ways to safety and care. 
These stories both light and dark are not myths or folklore, they are real to the people and to the land and linked to the human experience of connecting to place and ecologies we are yet to understand.
Further to these stories embedded in the spirit of country there are connections to the metaphysical and multidimensional space of time, between mind and matter with people and animal kin that are said to travel on astral plains beyond what we know on earth, that shapeshift and connect, who heal and pass on messages.
My ideas for this exhibition have come from the many years of yarns with Elders and community—the stories told around the kitchen table and campfires—and my passion to share community voice and culture, these stories relate to deep networks of knowledge. My aim for Shadow Spirit is to inspire and share with respect and integrity the many stories that relate to this theme—from the personal, the imaginative, the historical, and the cultural perspectives of the artists.” 
— Kimberley Moulton 
<hr>
Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta woman who grew up in Shepparton country Victoria and is an accomplished Senior Curator and writer. She is an Artistic Associate at RISING and a Senior Curator, First Peoples at Museums Victoria. Kimberley works with knowledge, histories and futures at the intersection of First Peoples historical collections and contemporary art and her practice works to extend the paradigm of what exhibitions and research in and out of institutions can be for First Peoples communities in Australia and globally. 
She has held Senior curatorial and community arts development roles at Museums Victoria for fifteen years and independently has curated numerous exhibitions and written extensively for art and museum publications worldwide. She has held curatorial and writing research fellowships across Europe, UK, U.S.A, South Asia and North America which have looked at both musicological collections of First Peoples belongings and contemporary art practices. 
In 2019 Kimberley won the University of Sydney Power Institute National Indigenous Art Writing Award and is currently a PhD research candidate for the Wominjeka Indigenous Research Lab and Monash University Melbourne. Kimberley is currently the deputy chair of the board for Shepparton Art Museum and a director of the board for non-for-profit The Adam Briggs Foundation.

Based on Kunibídji country in Arnhem Land, Maningrida Arts &amp; Culture is a pre-eminent site of contemporary cultural expression and art-making. The area where artists live encompasses 7,000 square kilometres of land and sea, and over 100 clan estates where people speak more than twelve distinct languages. 
The arts centre holds 20 exhibitions annually and has supported hundreds of artists on their homelands since it was established in the early 70s. The artists’ transformation of their sustaining belief system, djang, into a contemporary aesthetic has won them international success and intrigued collectors and curators from around the world. 
<h1 id="artists">ARTISTS</h1>
Anniebell Marrngamarrnga Kuninjku 
“I learnt how to weave from my mother, Nancy Djulumba, who passed away a long time ago [1995]. I first made coiled baskets, twined bags and string bags. I then learned how to paint from my husband [Dick Nadjolorro]. My favourite subject is the yawkyawk ngalkuburriyaymi, female spirit, who lives in the water at Kubumi. It is my husband’s Dreaming. I represent her in my bark paintings, in my timber carvings and also in my weaving. I came with the idea to make flat yawkyawk from pandanus [Pandanus spiralis]. First I build the bamboo frame and I then weave with colourful pandanus in the same technique I used when making twined bags. I use lots of different colours and I like it. Colours are important in my work.” - Anniebell Marrngamarrnga
Dorothy Bunibuni Kuninjku 
Dorothy is one of Maningrida Arts &amp; Culture&#39;s most exciting emerging fibre artists., She is sister to acclaimed artist and weaver Anniebell Marrngamarrnga Dorothy&#39;s innovative designs are made from locally collected pandanus and bush dyes which she collects from around Ji-balbal Outstation, on her father&#39;s country.
Paul Nabulumo Namarinjmak Kuninjku 
Paul Nabulumo is a painter and sculptor. He is the son of acclaimed artist, Mick Kubarkku (1925 - 2008). Nabulumo learned under his guidance, watching him paint on rock surfaces and bark paintings as a young man. The artist continues to paint the iconic imagery handed down from his father, including Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent), mimih (rock country spirit), yawkyawk (female water spirits), Kubumi (waterholes) and djulng (Ancestral bones). Nabulumo maintains strong connection to his heritage, living and working at Yikkarrakkal Outstation which sits adjacent to the dirdbim and kubumi djang (Ancestral) sites* . However, he has developed his own distinct aesthetic, characterised by striking combinations of fine and elegant rarrk, figurative elements and bold negative space. Nabulumo has shown both locally and internationally at highly regarded commercial spaces.
Ken Ngindjalakku Djungkidj Kuninjku 
Ken Djungkidj is the son of acclaimed artist, Mick Kubarkku (1925 - 2008), who was known for his painting of dirdbim (moon, sun and stars) and the associated site on his Kulmarru clan estate. Djungkidj learned under his guidance, watching him paint on rock surfaces and bark paintings as a young man. The artist continues to paint the iconic imagery handed down from his father, including Ngalyod (Rainbow Serpent), mimih (rock country spirit), yawkyawk (female water spirits), Kubumi (waterholes) and djulng (Ancestral bones).

A rotating gif of Maningrida participating artists: Dorothy Bunibuni, Ken Djungkidj, Anniebell Marrngamarrnga and Paul Nabulumo

Maningrida Artist GIF

Maningrida Artist Headshots

Dr Paola Balla is a Wemba Wemba and Gunditjmara woman and acclaimed artist, writer curator and educator. She focuses on Aboriginal women&#39;s stories and resistance with a visual practice, encapsulating research, art, memory and narrative realms. Her work centres Aboriginal women’s voices, activism, Sovereignty, and matriarchy and First Nations ways of being, knowing and doing. 
She has exhibited extensively over the last two decades including recent solo exhibition Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius; the ways Aboriginal women speak blak and back, (PhD examination) (2019) Footscray Community Arts Centre and recent group shows include Wilam Biik, Tarra Warra Museum of Art, (2021), Sovereign Sisters: domestic work, (2021) Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA), Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi Festival, Affirmation, (2020) Koorie Heritage Trust, for PHOTO 2021.

Rene was born in 1958, in Ernabella, South Australia. Her family are Pitjantjatjara and her Pitjantjatjara name is Wanuny. Rene grew up in the north of South Australia attending school at Amata before marrying and moving to her husband’s country of Docker River. Later in Mutitjulu, she became committed to art, inspired by her parents Walter Pukutiwara, and Topsy Tjulyata, acclaimed wood carvers and founders of Maruku Arts. 
Rene has worked in fabric, glass, ceramics and grass weaving. Her painting of Uluru proudly adorned a Qantas jet and as a Tjanpi Desert Weavers she represented Australia in the 2015 Venice Biennale with Fiona Hall. Also a member of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Joint Management, director for the NPY Women’s Council, Mutitjulu Community Aboriginal Corporation and Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir. Rene was also a founding director of Walkatjara Art and a current Director and previous chair of Maruku. When not creating art, Rene now spends much of her time travelling far and wide as both artist and advocate for her people.

The Mulka Project was established in 2007 at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala Live and work at Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre, Yirrkala; North East Arnhem Land, Australia; and throughout the world. The Mulka Project is a collective of practicing multimedia artists, cinematographers, sound engineers and post-production technicians based in Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land. The name Mulka means a sacred but public ceremony, and, to hold or protect. 
It is Mulka’s mission to sustain and protect Yolŋu cultural knowledge whilst being managed by Yolŋu law and governance. At the core of The Mulka Project resides a growing, living archive of Yolŋu knowledge, ceremony, and cultural history which gives voice to generations past and also allows contemporary Yolŋu knowledge and law to speak to coming generations and a worldwide audience. 
<h1 id="artists">ARTISTS</h1>
Senior artist and songwoman | Mulkuṉ Wirrpanda (1947-2021)
Senior Artist &amp; Cultural Director | Muluymuluy Wirrpanda 
Senior Songwoman | Muluymuluy Wirrpanda 
Senior Songman | Binygurr Wirrpanda 
Creative Director | Ishmael Marika 
Sound Designer | Arian Ganambarr Pearson 
Technical Designer | Joseph Brady 
Animator | Bec Charlesworth

Tiger Yaltangki is a Yankunytjatjara artist from Indulkana Community on the APY Lands in the remote north-west South Australia. Tiger is largely non-verbal, so his artistic practice represents a vital means of self-expression. A compulsive drawer and mark-maker, he works every day at Iwantja Arts. His output is often inspired by his love of sci-fi and closely informed by his passion for music. He paints to an eclectic soundtrack spanning from Creedence and country crooners to local desert reggae and rock and roll. The work often references the Anangu concept of ‘mamu’ (spirit beings), which appear alongside his pop cultural inspirations. Tiger has exhibited extensively and was recently a finalist in the Archibald Prize (2020) and in The National New Australian Art (2017) and has been a finalist several times in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
Jeremy Whiskey is a Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara guitarist-composer from Indulkana, APY Lands, SA. Whiskey fronted the Iwantja Band, touring and recording with them for many years and in 2022 released his debut solo album DREAMTIME. Whiskey’s music is informed by the Country where he was born and still lives, and his masterful guitar work interprets the Country, the seasons, and the Tjukurpa (Law), through melody, texture and lightning-fast shredding.

A member of the Keerray Wooroong language group of the Gunditjmara of western Victoria, Couzens is a distinguished Victorian Aboriginal artist with an interdisciplinary practice, or as she prefers to call it, ‘creative cultural expression’ that includes—painting, installation, visual arts, printmaking, mixed media, performing arts, language, ceremony and teaching—but is best known for her central role in the revival of the possum skin cloak making tradition which began in Victoria and is now established across south-eastern Australia. 
Vicki has worked in the Aboriginal community for more than 40 years and has played a significant role in not only cultural revival but also in language research and revival and has collaboration and cultural knowledge at the core of her practice. She has worked across the country in roles of cultural adviser, curatorial and creative development including Museums Victoria and the groundbreaking First Peoples exhibition. Couzens has taught extensively across Victoria and south-eastern Australia and is considered a Senior Knowledge Holder of language and possum cloak story. 
As an established creative maker and artist of immense impact Couzens work is collected nationally and internationally including Museums Victoria, National Museum of Australia, Australian Centre for Moving Image and National Gallery Victoria to name a few.

The art of Warwick Thornton draws from his acclaimed career as a cinematographer and award winning film director. In his art practice, Thornton is interested in negotiating the traces within colonial history, and the ongoing presence in contemporary landscapes, of Indigenous Australians. His oeuvre utilises photography, film and video to conceptualise time, space, identity, memory, and the social condition. 
As a film director, screenwriter and cinematographer, Thornton has received numerous awards, including the Caméra d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and the IFA Cultural Film Award at the 2009 Berlin Independent Film Festival for his debut feature film Samson and Delilah (2009). In 2017 his feature film Sweet Country (2017) won Best Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, as well as the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

The artists

AUNTY ZETA THOMSON (VIC)

Wurundjeri/Yorta Yorta

BRIAN ROBINSON (TSI/QLD)

Kala Lagaw Ya and Wuthathi

DYLAN MOONEY (TSI/QLD)

Yuwi, Meriam and South Sea Islander

HAYLEY MILLAR BAKER (VIC)

Gunditjmara

JOHN PRINCE SIDDON (WA)

Walmajarri

JUDY WATSON (QLD)

Waanyi

JULIE GOUGH (TAS)

Trawlwoolway

KARLA DICKENS (NSW)

Wiradjuri

MANINGRIDA ARTS & CULTURE (NT)

PAOLA BALLA (VIC)

Wemba Wemba / Gunditjmara

RENE WANUNY KULITJA (NT)

Pitjantjatjara

The Mulka Project with Mulkuṉ Wirrpanda (NT)

TIGER YALTANGKI (SA) WITH JEREMY WHISKEY (SA)

Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara/ Yankunytjatjara

Dr VICKI COUZENS (VIC)

Keerray Wooroong/ Gunditjmara

WARWICK THORNTON (NT)

kaytej

The artists

AUNTY ZETA THOMSON (VIC)

Wurundjeri/Yorta Yorta​

BRIAN ROBINSON (TSI/QLD)

Kala Lagaw Ya and Wuthathi

DYLAN MOONEY (TSI/QLD)

Yuwi, Meriam and South Sea Islander

HAYLEY MILLAR BAKER (VIC)

Gunditjmara

JOHN PRINCE SIDDON (WA)

Walmajarri

JUDY WATSON (QLD)

Waanyi

JULIE GOUGH (TAS)

Trawlwoolway

KARLA DICKENS (NSW)

Wiradjuri

MANINGRIDA ARTS & CULTURE (NT)​

PAOLA BALLA (VIC)

Wemba Wemba / Gunditjmara ​

RENE WANUNY KULITJA (NT)

Pitjantjatjara

The Mulka Project with Mulkuṉ Wirrpanda (NT)​

TIGER YALTANGKI (SA) WITH JEREMY WHISKEY (SA)

Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara/ Yankunytjatjara

Dr VICKI COUZENS (VIC)

Keerray Wooroong/ Gunditjmara

WARWICK THORNTON (NT)

kaytej

Wurundjeri/Yorta Yorta

Gunditjmara 

MANINGRIDA ARTS & CULTURE (NT)

Wemba Wemba / Gunditjmara

The Mulka Project with Mulkuṉ Wirrpanda (NT)