Of Southern Kaantju heritage, Naomi Hobson’s multi-disciplinary oeuvre documents her community’s navigation of traditional norms and contemporary realities within her ancestral land – the remote community of Coen, Cape York, in far North Queensland, a tiny township of some 300 people.
Set in a terrain of rainforest, open wooded country and abundant river systems that snake down to the Great Barrier Reef, this landscape and its marked political history charge Hobson’s colourful abstract compositions with spiritual presence.
Established as a gold mine in 1876, Coen became an epicentre of the Cape York gold rush. Colonial policies such as the introduction of police reserves and the expansion of the pastoral industry saw the free movement of Indigenous people disappear, as they became confined to reserves and cattle stations within their traditional lands. Hobson’s dense compositions are powerful evocations of such complexities – the river systems that thread through the region’s topography express abundance and bounty, while the image’s confinement within the frame suggests a certain sense of entrapment.