When Arkeria Rose Armstrong was just seven years old, her family packed up their life into a caravan and travelled Australia in search of gold.
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Little did she know at the time that exploring so many Aboriginal nations would shape her work as an artist and take her all the way to Holland.
“I think having that connection with a lot of different areas has given me that diversity in my work,” Ms Armstrong said.
“I was able to spend the time just wandering, and taking in my surroundings.”
Unrestrained by hours chimed by a school bell, Ms Armstrong set about exploring.
“Walking through those creek beds is almost like you’re going into a spiritual space,” she said.
“You have that dead stillness and you can just hear what’s around you and it’s none of that other noise.”
With her gold-prospecting father and her teacher mother, who made sure Ms Armstrong and her younger sister had an education during their childhood travel, gained a reverent respect for the remote communities she was welcomed into.
“Living in rural Australia makes you appreciate the country that you’re from as well, and having that deeper understanding of how to live on country,” she said.
“It’s about being respectful of whose country you’re on. We didn’t live with much as it was a caravan … I suppose it’s going down to the bare minimum of what you actually need.”
Ms Armstrong, a Gamilaraay woman, is much younger than the Aboriginal artists she knows, but the talent runs strong in her veins.
She describes her artistic style as a perfect blend of her mother’s and father’s sides.
Her grandfather, a Yorta Yorta man and Aboriginal artist in Shepparton, taught her the delicate art of dot painting.
Her grandmother, the last sand painter Gamilaraay woman Rose Fernando, was one of the last sand painters in the northern NSW country.
Sand painting, Ms Armstrong explained, was used in ceremonies. Lines were drawn into the earth combined with story-telling.
“She then started putting sand onto canvas, so you’re using it in more of a medium sort of sense,” Ms Armstrong said.
“Before that, you would actually draw your work into the ground.”
“It was an aid for story, but also about having that connection with the earth as well.”
Her own Aboriginal painting features both dots and line.
“When I look at my work, there are dots but there is also that linear aspect to it, so there’s that movement as well,” she said.
“Both my grandparents, even though they’re from different parts of Australia and they’re very different artists, it’s a sort of fusion of both of their influences.”
On the back of her first solo art show at Rotterdam’s Aboriginal Art Gallery, Ms Armstrong will be dedicating her summer to completing a series of paintings of the Pilbara for Alice Springs and getting involved in the local visual arts scene, all while raising her baby daughter Harriet.
