View the 72 individual paintings that make up Shirley Purdie’s Goowoolem Gijam – Gija plants (2013–16) Exhibition, accompanied by the artist’s voice.

This suite of paintings by Shirley Purdie depicts plants of the East Kimberley region of Western Australia used for food, medicine and object making. Conceived as a botanical encyclopedia, the work preserves vital cultural memory and information that has been passed down through generations of Gija people. It is the result of years of research by Purdie, who worked with linguist Frances Kofod to document individual plant species and record their Gija, Latin and English names: an exercise in cultural continuity and exchange.

Select a painting below to listen to the artist talk about each plant species in Gija.

“I made these paintings about the things I saw when / was growing up. They show the things my old women told me. They are about bush food, the things we can eat in the bush, fruits like black plum and that kind of thing and bush honey. Others that I painted show those trees used to make artefacts like fighting sticks, digging sticks and coolamons. Other paintings show the grasses that people used to use to make the spinifex resin that they used to join axe heads to the handles.”

Spoken by Shirley Purdie and recorded in Gija by Stephanie Rajalingam at Warmun Art Centre. English translation by Frances Kofod, October 2018.