Lorraine Connelly-Northey
Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s art practice has developed primarily outside her traditional Country. Born in 1962 and raised at Swan Hill in western Victoria, on Wamba Wamba traditional lands,
she was influenced by an amalgam of her father’s Irish ancestry and mother’s Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) heritage.
Reworking textural surfaces, Connelly-Northey bends, shapes, twists, stitches and merges found materials to create contemporary works of art that transform European industrialised waste into culturally iconic sculptural forms while alluding to little-known traditional weaving techniques and stories connected to her Country. The artist acquired this skill from her father on their many collecting trips. Connelly-Northey constantly sees the potential of found material and how it can be reworked and thinks about ways to build on new ideas, approaches and more efficient techniques.
Connelly-Northey first started making narrbongs (dilly bags) in 2002; they were small in scale and engagingly intimate. In 2007, they became much larger, their formal qualities more sculptural. Keith Munro, part of his essay for the unDisclosed, 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial , National Gallery of Australia
