Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori was a senior Kayardild woman born at Mirdidingki on the south side of Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her Kayardild name, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda, identifies both her birthplace and her totem—the dolphin (juwarnda). She spent the first years of her life on Bentinck Island before her community was displaced by environmental disaster in the late 1940s and relocated to Mornington Island, where she lived for the remainder of her life.

Sally Gabori began painting in 2005 at the age of 81, at the invitation of the Mornington Island Art Centre. With no formal training, she developed a singular visual language that merged contemporary abstraction with deeply embedded cultural memory. Her paintings, while appearing gestural and non-representational, convey vivid recollections of her homeland, including sacred sites, tidal lagoons, stone fish traps and clan estates.

Her works represent a powerful act of cultural continuity and personal reclamation. By painting places connected to her own and her family's Country—including Dibirdibi (her husband's totemic place), Thundi and the McKenzie River—Sally Gabori effectively re-mapped her world in paint. Through expressive brushwork and radiant colour, she celebrated the spiritual and ecological richness of Kayardild Country, speaking across time and geography.

Painting became a daily practice. Despite the late start to her career, Sally Gabori rapidly gained international recognition for her dynamic, large-scale works that defied expectation and expanded perceptions of contemporary First Nations art. Her paintings resist conventional cartography, instead offering deeply embodied and sensorial expressions of Country through memory, lived experience and cultural knowledge.

Following her passing in 2015, Sally Gabori's importance within Australian and international contemporary art has continued to grow. Her work has been the subject of major institutional retrospectives, including a landmark exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2022), and is held in significant public collections throughout Australia and overseas.

2006 – Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award
2006 – ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award
2007, 2009, 2010 & 2014 – Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards finalist
2008 – Western Australian Indigenous Art Award finalist
2011 – Blake Prize finalist
2011 - Gold Coast Art Prize finalist
2012 – Winner, The Gold Award, Rockhampton Museum of Art (formerly the Rockhampton Art Gallery Gold Award)
2012 – Winner, Togart Contemporary Art Award, Darwin
2012 – Geelong Contemporary Art Prize finalist
2013 – Fleurieu Art Prize finalist

2023 Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy – presentation of the Fondation Cartier
2022 Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France
2016 Sally Gabori, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, QLD
2014 Sally Gabori, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, VIC
2010 Makarrki – My Big Brother, King Alfred’s Country, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
2008 Dulka Warngiid – Land of All, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
2005 Woolloongabba Art Gallery, Brisbane, QLD

2024 Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, National Gallery of Australia
2018 Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
2017 The National 2017: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales (also presented across partner institutions)
2015 Indigenous Art: Moving Backwards into the Future, NGV, Melbourne
2013 My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
2012 National Indigenous Art Triennial: unDisclosed, NGA, Canberra
2010 Aboriginal Australia: Art and Identity, The British Museum, London
2010 Land, Sea and Sky: Contemporary Art of the Torres Strait Islands, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
2008 Optimism, GOMA, Brisbane
2007 Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award, QAG, Brisbane
2007 Story Place: Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest, National Gallery of Victoria

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
Aboriginal Art Museum, The Netherlands
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
Holmes à Court Collection, Perth
Woolloongabba Art Gallery, Brisbane

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori's secondary market has developed considerably since her first works appeared at auction in 2008. From relatively modest beginnings, demand strengthened steadily as collectors and institutions came to recognise the importance of her extraordinary late-career practice. By the early 2010s, strong clearance rates and increasingly substantial prices demonstrated a growing confidence in her work, while her death in 2015 brought further attention to the finite nature of her output.

The market accelerated particularly strongly during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Annual auction turnover rose from A$142,125 in 2016 to A$420,964 in 2020, before reaching approximately A$1.2 million from 25 works offered in 2023. This growth coincided with increasing institutional and international recognition and a broader reassessment of Sally Gabori's place within Australian contemporary art.

A major turning point came in March 2023 with the sale of Ninjilki, 2008 at Deutscher and Hackett. Estimated at A$60,000–80,000, the work realised A$251,591 including buyer's premium, more than three times its low estimate and dramatically surpassing her previous Australian auction benchmark. Later that year, Big River at Thundi, a monumental 197 x 304 cm canvas, sold at Sotheby's New York for US$190,500, establishing an international auction record for the artist and demonstrating the depth of demand beyond the Australian market.

Importantly, these exceptional results have not proved isolated. Subsequent sales indicate that Gabori's market has consolidated at a substantially higher level. In March 2025, Nyinyilki Country, 2010 sold for A$110,455 against an estimate of A$50,000–70,000, while My Country, 2009 achieved A$61,364 against A$28,000–35,000. In August of the same year, Dibirdibi Country, 2011 realised A$71,182 against an estimate of A$28,000–38,000, and in May 2026 another Dibirdibi Country sold through Bonhams for A$79,950. These results demonstrate continuing competition for well-provenanced examples even below the monumental scale of her auction-record works.

The strongest-performing paintings tend to combine several characteristics: substantial scale, early or particularly strong provenance, and subjects associated with the principal places of Bentinck Island that recur throughout her practice. Works relating to Thundi, Nyinyilki, Dibirdibi and My Country/My Father's Country have been particularly sought after. Scale is an important factor, but it is not the only determinant of value; compelling composition, colour, date, provenance and the significance of the Country represented can substantially differentiate works of otherwise similar dimensions.

Provenance is especially important within Gabori's market. Paintings carrying documentation or catalogue numbers from Mornington Island Arts and Crafts and established primary-market galleries provide collectors with a clear chain of ownership and are generally the examples most readily accepted at the upper end of the secondary market. Recent high-value sales have repeatedly involved works with strong art centre and gallery provenance.

The international dimension of her market is also increasingly significant. The record-setting Sotheby's New York sale demonstrated that demand is no longer confined to Australian collectors, while her growing institutional profile in Europe has introduced her practice to a substantially broader audience. This international exposure has helped reposition Sally Gabori not simply within the field of First Nations art, but within the wider history of post-war and contemporary abstraction.