Author Description

Shireen Malamoo's paintings are meditations on the artist's upbringing in the strict, Pentecostal church system, and fuse the iconographies and narratives of Christianity and her own South Sea Islander and Aboriginal heritage. Drawing on these very distinctive cultural and spiritual backgrounds, it is no surprise that Malamoo's works are complicated and beautiful meditations onher people's past and future.The artist expresses her own difficulties in reconciling these parts of her life, as well as some of the more troubling aspects of only Australia's colonial history, specifically the people of the South Sea Islands, whose story is such a seminal, heartbreaking and often overlooked part of North Queensland's history. Malamoo's paintings are vivid, beautiful and powerful, reflecting her own complex world.