Fine Art Gallery

Artist Profile

Freddie Timms began painting in 1986, inspired by the elder artists already painting at Frog Hollow, a small outstation attached to the community at Warmun, Turkey Creek. He was by then, forty-two years old and had lived an eventful life as a young stockman on stations throughout the East Kimberley region. Freddy was born at Police Hole in 1946 and followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a stockman at Lissadell Station. At the age of twenty, he set out to explore and work on other stations. It was during this time that he met and worked alongside Rover Thomas who was to have a lasting influence on him. In 1985, he left Lissadell, to which he had returned after retiring from the physically demanding stockman’s life. He settled at the new community established at Warmun, where he worked as a gardener at the Argyle Mine. He eventually moved out to Frog Hollow with his wife Berylene Mung and their four children, taking a job as an environmental health worker and assuming responsibility for the general maintenance of the small community. While in the company of elder artists such as Rover Thomas and Hector Jandanay, who were already painting and achieving notoriety at this time, Timms requested art materials from Joel Smoker, the first art coordinator at Waringarri Arts in Kununurra. Smoker visited the community on a regular basis and recognized Freddy’s potential in his first distinctive canvasses and confident grasp of the medium.

In a career that spanned more than 20 years, Freddy Timms has become known for aerial map-like visions of country that are less concerned with ancestral associations as with tracing the responses and refuges of the Gidja people as they encountered the ruthlessness and  brutality of colonisation. However, his political nature is characterized by more intimate interpretations of the experience rather than overtly political statements. His first exhibition held at Deutscher Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne in 1989 was received with critical acclaim and included a superb masterpiece, Mandangala, North Turkey Creek 1990. In what appeared as a new and beautiful sense of irregular geometry, soft yet boldly defined blocks of colour depicted the area of Glen Hill and the Argyle Diamond Mine to the north of Turkey Creek. The fact that it now lay beneath water, having been flooded by the damming of the Ord River, made the work all the more poignant. There had been no consultation with the traditional Gidja owners. The places where he and his countrymen used to walk and camp, along with all its ancestral burial grounds and sacred places, were simply buried beneath the rising waters.

This underlying political dimension has remained implicit in Freddy Timm’s work throughout a career which has been punctuated by a number of politically explicit works. Another work, Whitefella-Blackfella, acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, overtly states the position of Aboriginal people in Australian society, placing ‘whitefella’ figures at the top, beneath which are painted Chinamen, then African and then finally 'blackfella right down at the bottom'.