This etching is part of Billy Benn’s sustained return to Artetyerre (Harts Range), his father’s Country and the place he painted “from memory and feeling.” Working through line, tone, and the etched bite of the plate, Benn maps ridgelines and saddles as if walking them: horizons lift and fall; valleys open into pale passages; outcrops hold like anchors in the field. The image is not a literal survey but recollections - Country reassembled through memory and the bodily knowledge of travelling, hunting and living there.
Benn first found a regular place to make art through Bindi Inc. in Alice Springs, and he often spoke about learning from his older sisters Ally Kemerre and Gladdy Kemerre. His father made artefacts, boomerangs, spears, carved wood, so making was part of the fabric of home. Across painting and printmaking alike, Benn’s approach is open and unguarded: he lets the land arrive on the surface, shifting colour or mark as needed rather than following a fixed style. Viewers sometimes recognise hints of European traditions, the play of light, the rolling mass of ranges, but Benn’s touch remains firmly his own, grounded in Central Australian Country and story.
“My country is Artetyerre, Harts Range, south and east Arrernte… My Dreaming is Antenhe (possum).” In these etchings, that declaration is translated into the language of intaglio: compressed, luminous, and precise. Each plate reads as a different vantage, two ways of remembering the same place, offered with the quiet determination of an artist who once said he would paint every hill and then go home.
