abstract indigenous art
tommy friday art
Works that explore how fragments of memory, landscape and experience gather into something singluar; existance.
about me
brush. dot. line.
I am guided by Indigenous heritage and Buddhist practice, in every work I attempt to find that space between a person and nature to explore how the experience of one another creates existence.
Brush, dot and line are my way of honouring the dialogue between land, water and life.
GALLERY COMING SOON..
a saltwater man on saltwater land
Born, raised, living and practicing from the beautiful South Coast of Australia.
I am a proud Dharawal man. I am a Saltwater artist based in Wollongong.
A life spent on this land gave an education, a reverence, a love and fear of ocean. While at times destructive, other times triumphant, I see water as a powerful being, beautiful and terrifying.
Water appears in my work as an ancestor and a teacher, a force that shapes Country and life.
About
saltwater art
An edge is never a boundary, only a point of change. Each painting builds slowly, layer over demanding layer, until disparate marks settle into cohesion. What emerges is not an image of place, but a feeling of being within it.
These works are constructed through accumulation, repetition, tension and release. They sit at the edge between control and surrender, where structure gives way to instinct.
My practice moves between fragmentation and unity. Marks gather, collide and reconcile until something singular holds. I often return to water, the ocean, and my experience of it. Between us, the two entities in motion, something is exchanged, resisted and surrendered. In that meeting existence reveals itself. My paintings do not depict the sea, or land or nature; they arise from that encounter.
country
Dharawal
Education
Eora TAFE
Based in
Wollongong, on Dharawal Land