Self-Guided Trail: Seeds of Change: Self-Guided Tour
Work 8 of 12

Untitled (TBOMB) is a monumental diptych painting from a series created by Boyd while spending a year in his mother’s family’s Country, which overlooks Trinity Bay, south of Cairns. He worked from a photograph – taken before he was born – of a family picnic on the beach. This painting, of a humble family celebration, is a familiar image across time and place and is one that occurs repeatedly across the history of European art.

Boyd has applied dots of glue across the canvas and then painted over the dots. While this technique echoes the dotting often found in some Aboriginal art, the artist has explained that his work has ‘no cultural connection to Western Desert painting, instead the dotting has more of a relationship with Gestalt psychology, where it is about perception and the law of closure’. This work encourages audiences to both challenge their view of shared human experiences and also to question their relationship with, and assumptions about, Aboriginal art.