Noila Canara, Beautiful Singer 2015

Summary

A storyteller and painter, South Gippsland–based artist Lisa Kennedy is descended from the Trawlwoolway people of eastern Tasmania. Her works, created in watercolour, gouache and acrylic, are, she says, ‘inspired by true events, dreams and ancestral promptings’. This acrylic on canvas, ‘Noila Canara, Beautiful Singer’, was shortlisted for the 2015 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards and came into the collection the same year. It was purchased in association with ‘Executed in Franklin Street’, an exhibition that commemorated the lives of two Tasmanian Aboriginal men publicly hanged in Melbourne in 1842. The exhibition was curated by Paola Balla and shown at the City Gallery between November 2015 and February 2016.