Malaluba Gumana

Gumana was born in 1953[7] and lived in the Gangan homeland of the Blue Mud Bay region in Northeast Arnhem Land.[1] She is an artist with Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre[7] in Yirrkala, an Indigenous community-controlled art centre of Northeast Arnhem Land.[8] Her complex and fluid paintings frequently refer to the story of the all-powerful Rainbow Serpent or ‘wititj’ (olive python) as it travels through her mother's Gålpu clan lands.[9] She mainly represents the Gålpu clan designs of ‘dhatam’ (water lily), ‘djari’ (rainbow), ‘djayku’ (file snake) and ‘wititj’ (olive python),[7] applying the technique of ‘marwat’ (cross-hatching) using a finely controlled hair brush.[5] Intellectual property rights of clan designs are held by the clan, and only people with rights to certain designs are able to use them.[10]

Gumana is well-known for her production of larrakitj[1] which the Yolngu people used as bone receptacles in traditional funerary rites.[2] The larrakitj are made from stringy bark trees that have been hollowed out by termites.[6] The trees are selected and harvested after the dry-season fires and are then smoothed and shaped for painting with ochres in a cultural process, with each larrakitj presenting clan-specific designs.

From 2006, Gumana started creating larger and more complex work with the encouragement of her art centre.[3] In 2007, her work was shown for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin. In 2008, her bark and hollow logs sold out at an exhibition with Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, and her ‘dhatam’ imagery was selected by the Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures for T-shirt and promotional material.  By 2009, her larrakitj were part of the Kerry Stokes Larrakitj Collection, which exhibited that year at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth,[6] and also won an exhibition place in the 17th Sydney Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010.[3] In 2013, she won a NATSIAA award in the category for Bark Painting,[4] followed by another win in 2019 of NATSIAA’s Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award for three-dimensional work by an Indigenous artist.[5]

Gumana’s work is held in permanent collections at the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.[3] Her work is part of Kerry Stokes’ Larrakitj Collection, and is also held in private art collections at Woodside Energy Ltd and the Estate of Kerry Packer.