Biography

Kanthanampu, b. 1960 Irene Namok is a senior Kanthanampu artist from Lockhart River in Cape York, Queensland. Born on Thursday Island, she has family connections to the Torres Strait and deep cultural knowledge of the country surrounding Lockhart River. Irene paints what she knows: Country, culture, family life and the emotions carried by particular places and memories. She is also the mother of artist Rosella Namok. Country: Kutini Irene is particularly known for painting Kutini, or Cassowary Country, within the Iron Range near Lockhart River. Her subjects include rainforest, bushfires, lagoons, waterholes, saltwater and places used for fishing, swimming and gathering. She also paints meeting places and community occasions: children painted for ceremony, families sitting together and people yarning around the fire beneath the moon. Style and Technique Irene’s paintings are intuitive and expressive, often built through broad fields of blended colour. Layered bands, gestural marks and softly shifting forms evoke the movement of light across rainforest, water and sky. Rather than describing Country literally, she distils its atmosphere and emotional presence, allowing memory, landscape and cultural knowledge to merge across the canvas. Irene’s Palette Colour is central to Irene’s practice. She draws inspiration from the changing brightness of morning, midday and sunset, and from sunlight reflected across the saltwater at Sun Beach. Warm yellows, oranges, reds and pinks often meet deep blues, greens and purples, creating luminous transitions that suggest heat, water, fire and tropical vegetation. For the Collector Irene is one of the established senior artists associated with the contemporary Lockhart River art movement. Her work has been presented at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Art Paris Art Fair and in Islands in the Sea at Fondation Burkhardt-Felder Arts et Culture in Switzerland. Her paintings are held in the Fondation Burkhardt-Felder Arts et Culture and the Lepley Collection in Western Australia.