For over 25 years Joanne, a celebrated Indigenous artist born in Mitchell, has staked her artistic and cultural identity in a minimally refined painting style. Joanne’s distinctive linear patterning symbolise her earliest memories of the Maranoa River. Many of Joanne’s works incorporate snippets of her Gungguri language and the Maranoa shield designs often layered together and presented as a contemporary new visual language.

The importance of the river as a metaphor for life and change is constant in the artist’s paintings. Water is also a place of reflection. The river takes Joanne back to the hardships of her early life living on the banks of the Maranoa River in Mitchell, through her journey to the present with her family based now in south-east Queensland. Joanne’s new paintings have a vibrant dimension to them. Embedded Indigenous language ‘snippets’ and Maranoa shield forms have been printed as the background of her canvases providing a contrast to her hand-painted style. The works bring us to a far more contemporary reading of her life in art. Joanne recently commented,

I grew up on the ‘Yumba’, out west by the banks of the Maranoa River in the 1960s. Now I live closer to Brisbane where we raised our kids and now our grandkids. I’ve always painted about the Maranoa area, the traditional designs found on shields and artefacts, the lines and colours of the river…I try to keep it simple…clean and sharp!

Joanne has realised a highly charged individual style that, although instantly recognisable as Aboriginal, speaks of her journey as an artist moving within cultures. The importance of the river as a metaphor is a constant in Joanne’s painting, as this takes her back to the hardships of her early life living on the banks of the Maranoa River. Her paintings speak of the river as a living entity; the rippling of the surface and the changes of the water can be seen as the many different events of her own life. 

 In 2008, she won The Wynne Prize at AGNSW and has been a finalist numerous times in the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Award. Joanne’s work is held in several private and public collections including Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Museum of Brisbane.