Thea Anamara Perkins

Working from family photographs and memory, Thea Anamara Perkins paints scenes from her personal archive. The portraits of Perkins and her sisters echo the recurring presence of sisters in Aboriginal Dreaming, where creation stories connect people, Country and culture. For Perkins, sisters embody a worldview in which family and culture are inseparable. She describes these works as part of an “everywhen”, where ancestral time and contemporary experience exist together. Alongside the portraits, a panoramic landscape and a cluster of painted suns locate these histories within Country and Dreaming. Perkins creates images that challenge inherited representations of First Nations people. She describes them as “glimmers”: moments of belonging and safety with the power to enter the collective imagination.

Thea Anamara Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman from Central Australia, uses portraiture as a site of representation, reflection and assertion. Drawing from family photographs, she selects intimate moments that hold emotional and historical significance, translating them into compositions that move between the personal, political acts of resistance and activism. Her work addresses how First Nations people are seen, represented and how images circulate, insisting on forms of self-representation grounded in family and community experience. Through a careful attention to gesture and expression, her paintings foreground tenderness as a force that shapes memory, visibility and cultural continuity.

La Biennale de Lyon acknowledges all First Nations peoples of Australia, their Traditional Custodians of the lands, and Elders past and present. We honour the enduring strength, diversity, and richness of First Nations artistic and cultural practices. We recognise First Nations peoples as Australia’s first artists, whose creative traditions have been sustained across millennia and continue to shape the Nation’s cultural landscape today.