Self-Guided Trail: Seeds of Change: Self-Guided Tour
Work 11 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 overlooking Trinity Bay, south of Cairns. He worked from a family 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 seen time and again throughout the history of European art.

Boyd has applied dots of glue across the canvas and then has painted over the dots. While this echoes the dotting often found in some Aboriginal art, the artist has said 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, but also question their relationship with and assumptions about Aboriginal art.