Penny Bidd and Keith Nenowatt

1. Yarra 1600 mm x 1060 mm unstretched
2. WINJAR 1500 mm x 1070 mm unstretched
Provenances: the paintings are collaborative pieces by Penny Bidd and her husband Keith Nenowatt.

Penny Bidd is a mother and grandmother who is 46. Her first language is Ngarinyin and her dambun or clan estate is Winyuduwa. Penny has been painting for several years, but has never realised her full potential as an artist because she is dissatisfied with the established art industry that she believes commodifies and distorts her culture. Along with personal satisfaction, Penny's motivation for painting is to transmit Ngarinyin knowledge of land and culture to her children and grandchildren and to use the proceeds of painting to buy back the ancestral lands that were stolen from her ancestors during the advance of the pastoral frontier. Penny says that so far the Native Title Act of 1993 and its administrators have little to offer, so the most certain way of recovering her family land is through painting.

Penny and her husband Keith do not drink alcohol , and like most Indigenous grandparents they care for many children. The pursuit of justice for Penny and Keith is confronted at every turn by domestic and structural challenges that are usually beyond the imagination and recognition of 'mainstream Australia'.

Keith Nenowatt is 42, and also speaks Ngarinyin. His motivation and experience of art mirrors that of his wife Penny. Keith is a good bloke who daily faces tough odds with patient determination. His desire for change is repeatedly frustrated by government departments and NGOs unequal to the challenges faced by those Indigenous people who are affected by three major assaults on their well-being and attachments to ancestral lands. Initially the pastoral frontier superimposed itself over their ancestors by taking their land and their exploiting labour; later on the pastoral industry industrialised and restructured in the 1960s forcing Indigenous people off their homelands and into camps fringing Kimberley towns; and finally, this enforced mass exodus from homelands coincided with the introduction of welfare payments, or sit down money, and the relaxation of alcohol restrictions which negatively amplified an already a disastrous situation, and from which there has been no sociologically significant recovery for 'self-described bush blackfellas'.

Bidd & Nenowatt are represented in Europe by ARTEGIRO www.artegiro.com.
For any queries, expo and sales please contact artegiro@gmail.com

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