Coen is my home. My family and country mean everything to me. Naomi Hobson is a multi-disciplinary Artist from Coen, Cape York. She resides on the banks of a river where her residence is an old tin shed that was once her village church. Coen is a small township of 300 people at the bottom of the McIlwraith Ranges (part of the Great Dividing Range) surrounded by the east coast of Cape York Peninsula, rainforest and open wooded country, with many river systems that snake down to the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef. The local clans include Kaantju, Umpila, LamaLama, Ayapathu, Wik Mungkan and Olkola. This landscape has provided inspiration for Naomi’s paintings.
Naomi’s colourful abstract compositions act as a link between individuality and a shared identity. Her inspiration comes from the vast traditional lands of her ancestors. I paint in my own personal space where I feel most comfortable including my back veranda, in the dry river beds, on the banks of my childhood fishing places as well as at the camp sites that my families have lived and spent time for thousands of years. I will take time to look at the miniature things, the tiny little things that nature hides. More recently, Naomi is further inspired by the richness of cultural diversity she witnessed first-hand while exploring village life, rural farmlands and the organised urban chaos throughout South East Asia. Hobson’s uses photography to give an insight into real life characters in her community that is mostly unseen and misrepresented in mainstream viewpoints of Aboriginal Australia while her ceramics is creative manifestation of her cultural spiritual belief system.
The landscape of Coen is also imbued with a marked political history. Since European settlement Aboriginal people there maintained a connection to their country through working on pastoral properties. Hobson’s grandfather was employed as a stockman for a European family, while other local indigenous people worked as farmhands (cooking, cleaning, gardening, baby-sitters) for no financial reward. Further, Hobson’s family have been active in indigenous land rights and reform movements in the effort to return traditional lands and on social and economic reforms to her Cape York community of Coen. Through her art, Hobson continues her family tradition of political and social engagement. Every brushstroke expresses the innate embeddedness of cultures and country in her paintings. However, this specific link to place is brought about through a keen sense of her own individuality.
My aboriginality is what grounds me. Through art I get to freely express all of this.
I can share my creative freedoms in a contemporary way. My style also reflects my individuality... I want my work to tell my stories in an innovative way, I want to introduce new work, to maintain a point of difference, I am wary to re-define and not recycle.
