In August 2025, D Lan Galleries curator Vanessa Merlino travelled to the community of Aurukun on the Cape York Peninsula, far North Queensland, to visit senior Wik-Mungkan elder and acclaimed artist, Janet Koongotema. The visit formed part of our second project with Wik & Kugu Art Centre, with whom we are proud to collaborate once again to present recent paintings by Janet at this year’s edition of Melbourne Art Fair (19-22 February) and subsequently, at our flagship Melbourne gallery (28 February-2 April 2026).

Vanessa has described seeing Janet’s work in a diary about her visit and said, ‘Watching her work, I begin to understand what I had seen on the river. Janet’s paintings are not representations of landscape; they are the landscape, compressed and encoded. Each band holds the belonging of homelands; its embodied ‘Aw, memories of lived experience, a way of being on Country, and their places in time, both ancestral and historic, weave them together.’

We invite you to discover more about Janet Koongotema and her Country in this short film by Gus Davidson, which has this week been debuted at Melbourne Art Fair as part of the exhibition, Archer River Country.