There are twenty five medium to large sized  works very well displayed in this gallery tucked away in a side street in Paddington. It is a vivid, bold exhibition, quite abstract essentially, incorporating a marvelous eye for colour and composition that captures the imagination.

For Michael Philp, of the Bundjalung people, home is the Caldera – the land that stretches from beneath Wollumbin following the Tweed River down from Murwillumbah to Cudgen, Chinderah, Fingal and Duranbah and out to the ocean.The path of the river maps the home of his people.

This latest, very autobiographical series of paintings is an intimate personal history, representing Philp’s loving relationship with home and country.

The exhibition focuses on questions of identity in a fractured community and changed landscape. Son to a white fisherman and a Murri woman, Michael grew up in the Caldera indigenous community and landscape.

Recollections of family ,childhood and Catholic schooling  are blended with the Midjinbil waterways and coast of Northern New South Wales in a singularly intimate and personal  statement about  history and place .

Both nostalgic and damaged, the paintings are a triumph of healing, reconciliation and optimism. The memories depicted in the series occur roughly between the seventies and eighties, a time when the area we know as the Tweed,Wollumbin, Cudgen, Chinderah, Fingal and also the Gold Coast to the North were going through massive change and development

Philp  has been in several exhibitions, both group and solo , and received a commendation in the New South Wales Premier Art Prize. His painting ‘The Warrior’ was accepted into a traveling exhibition of the Regional Galleries of New South Wales.

The  coast, the saltwater sections , rivers and ocean all feature in the paintings , as an actual working part of identity, personal and collective. The series is as much ‘portrait’ as it is ‘landscape and environment’ . The simplicity of application together with bold expanses of pigment, reach a raw cadence of potent symbolism. The exhibition  could also be entitled ‘Blue series’ or ‘Water’ as the colour blue (many different shades of it !) dominate the exhibition. Aboriginal dot painting style is used for some representations of water and also for some of the fishing nets etc .

A lot of the paintings are of crayfishing, oystering , ‘pippying’ at night and the hard work involved in fishing . Looming block like silhouettes of human beings are mostly represented as being dominated by the landscape  but there are a couple of paintings where the emotional impact is huge and they are instead large blocklike almost paper cutout like figures (for example ‘My Father’s Embrace’ , and possibly ‘Calming Times’ . )

A delightful , fascinating exhibition. Michael Philp: My Saltwater Murris is exhibiting at  Mary Place Gallery ,29 October to 10 November, 2013