D Lan Galleries will present Sally Gabori: Bentinck Island, 2005–2007 at its Sydney space on Queen Street from 5 November to 5 December 2026. The exhibition concentrates on the first three years of the painting career of Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924–2015), a senior Kaiadilt woman from Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Gabori was born and raised on the island and was known as a weaver and a singer of Kaiadilt songs. In 1948, after a drought and cyclonic flooding, the Kaiadilt community was moved to neighbouring Mornington Island. The gallery notes that Bentinck Island nonetheless remained at the centre of her cultural and family life.
She took up painting in 2005, in her eighties, at the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre. The exhibition gathers works from 2005 to 2007 tied to specific places: her own birthplace, Mirdidingki; Dibirdibi Country, associated with her husband; the Country of her brother King Alfred; and that of her father. According to the gallery, Gabori shifted quickly in these years between very different ways of depicting the island. Her Kaiadilt name reflects the same bond with place, Mirdidingkingathi marking her as someone born at Mirdidingki and Juwarnda referring to her totem, the black dolphin.
Coastlines, reefs, waterholes and family sites appear repeatedly in the paintings, though their forms keep changing from one work to the next. The gallery argues that these early canvases should not be read as tentative first steps, presenting the period instead as a burst of invention in which Gabori used a medium new to her to give shape to a lifetime of knowledge, memory and relationships connected with Bentinck Island.
An exhibition catalogue is due to be released on 22 October, ahead of the opening.
