Gallery One this Septmeber hosts a powerful new exhibition by local First Nations artist Goompi Ugerabah, titled Jarrah Nga Tab’bil (Earth and Water). The exhibition brings together a compelling body of recent works by the artist, exploring the elemental relationship between land and water, Country and story.
Goompi holds deep connections to Kombemerri Country along the Gold Coast and to Minjungbal Country in the Tweed Heads region. His tribal name, “Goompi Ugerabah,” loosely translates to “possum from the place of the goanna.”
Though Goompi’s ancestral roots reach back toward the Gurreng Gurreng peoples of the Pialba area (in Queensland), his life and creative practice are embedded in the South East Queensland / Northern New South Wales border region. From a young age he was initiated into Culture—song, dance and language—taught by local elders and cultural custodians, particularly the Walker brothers, who are Nunukal songmen and dancers from Stradbroke Island.
Goompi began translating those songlines and cultural narratives into visual art. Self-taught, he adopted a distinctive language of dotwork, line flow, and a restrained palette often evoking ochres, saltwater, and the shifting interplay of land and river systems. Throughout his career, he has exhibited both regionally and internationally, and his works now appear in numerous private and public collections. In 2023, he was awarded the Paddington Art Prize for Landscape, further cementing his reputation as one of Australia’s rising Indigenous art voices.
Goompi, occasionally his cultural performances—song, dance, storytelling—are integrated into gallery events. He also leads workshops and educational sessions in the region, connecting youth and community with ancestral knowledge through art.
In terms of craft, the scale of many pieces in the show challenges traditional “dot painting” expectations. Goompi manipulates scale, direction, and negative space to great effect. His palette is restrained yet evocative—tonal shifts in white, sand, ochre, charcoal, and greys evoke fog over rivers, shifting sands, or light in mangrove channels.
Goompi’s work stands out for balancing abstraction and narrative — the viewer senses that each line, dot, and shape is anchored in lived topographies, not pure aesthetic play. His works resist flattening — they hold tension, breathing space, and depth.
The title Jarrah Nga Tab’bil draws from First Nations language elements evoking earth (jarrah) and water (tab’bil). The exhibition gathers works that meditate on how these forces interconnect — how waterways carve into land, how soil holds memory, how trace elements of Country resist separation.
From sweeping canvases that echo tidal flows to more intimate pieces that gesture to estuaries and mangrove fringes, the works collectively map the contours of Goompi’s Country. There is a strong sense of movement—water as a life-giving and connective force, but also as a boundary, a marker of change. Earth speaks through texture, ochre tones, and layered dot formations that evoke soil depth and sediment.
Goompi’s process is as much spiritual and cultural as it is visual: the paintings are acts of remembering, of stitching contemporary aesthetic language to ancestral knowledge.
Goompi Ugerabah’s digital catalogue is available via on Goompi’s artist page with full artwork listings and pricing.