Minyma Malilu, 2023

Carolanne Ken was born in 1971 and resides in Kaltjiti, formerly Fregon, located in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Carolanne went to school in Kaltjiti as a young girl, and later went to Ingle Farm High School in Adelaide, where she graduated in 1986. Carolanne commenced painting in 2004 at Kaltjiti Arts where she had previously assisted in studio management before devoting herself to painting full time. Carolanne has one son, Clive, and one granddaughter. Carolanne paints Minyma Malilu, a "big story" from the APY Lands which was passed down to her through her maternal grandmother. Malilu was an ancestral woman who was travelling the country, trying to find one of her daughters who had run away with the ‘wrong man’. When she found the couple, she dug out a cave with her piti (coolamon) to create a big wiltja (shelter). The large roundels represent Malilu's cave and the paths that she, and other women of the community, would walk to access it. This is Carolanne’s grandmother’s country, and this story has deep spiritual and cultural significance to Carolanne. She maps out her canvases with painterly brush work, and refines the forms of roundels and emanating arcs with a fine dotting technique. Carolanne is a highly regarded and well-collected artist who has participated in numerous exhibitions; in 2019, her work was projected onto the Sydney Opera House as part of Badu Gili (meaning ‘water light’ in the language of the traditional owners of Bennelong Point, the Gadigal people).

There are stories that settle into you slowly—like a rhythm remembered, or a landscape you've never seen but somehow recognize. Minyma Malilu is one of those stories. Carolanne Ken carries it with grace: the journey of an ancestral woman, carved into earth and carried forward through women’s voices, through paint, through presence. This work holds a quiet weight. It speaks of matriarchal strength, of longing, law, and the sacredness of place. You feel it in the rhythm of Ken’s mark-making—in the stillness between the circles. There is tenderness here, but also unshakable resilience. It reminds us why we began curating at all: to listen more closely, to stories deeper than our own.

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