Three Painters - Katherine Hattam, Milly James, Maureen Poulson Napangardi

Three Painters — Katherine Hattam, Milly James, Maureen Poulson Napangardi  brings together distinct yet resonant practices that explore how identity is shaped through narrative, familial memory, place and the enduring presence of country. Across painting, mark-making becomes a language through which personal and collective histories are held, revised and transmitted.

Katherine Hattam’s work draws on inherited stories, art historical references, and intimate acts of looking. Her paintings weave memory with citation, allowing fragments of the past to surface and recede. Specific memories include of Hattam’s childhood home and Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns however images are not fixed records but mutable traces, shaped by time, translation and the emotional charge of remembrance.

London-based Milly James approaches painting as a diaristic and bodily practice. Through repetition, gesture, and layered surfaces, her works register lived experience and the quiet persistence of domestic/studio narratives. Marks accumulate like thoughts or routines, mapping a sense of self that is continually formed through doing, repeating and returning.

For Luritja artist Maureen Poulson Napangardi, painting is inseparable from country, story and kinship. Born in Haast's Bluff and based in Papunya, Maureen’s works are grounded in ancestral knowledge and lived connection to land. Through painting she translates her main dreaming story of Kalipinypa — a water dreaming site west of Kintore — into rhythmic and dazzling diamond patterns and fields of marks. Here, painting operates as both continuity and responsibility, affirming identity through the act of making.

Together, these artists reveal painting as a site where story is carried not only in imagery, but in touch, rhythm and repetition. The works invite us to consider how memory and identity are inscribed through paint, and how personal histories intersect with broader cultural and geographic lineages, across generations, places and shared acts of attentiveness.

Maureen Poulson Napangardi courtesy Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne and Papunya Tjupi Arts.