Dr Julie Dowling returns this month with her first Western Australian solo exhibition in many years.

The exhibition, Guwanda Barna (Feeling Country), opens at Gallows Gallery in Boorloo/Perth on Thursday, October 16 at 6:30pm, and runs through until November 9. The opening will be officiated by Carly Lane, curator of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art AGWA, and Robert Eggington, director of Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation.

Guwanda Barna delivers a body of work that is as politically charged as it is emotionally resonant. It is art as testimony, art as resistance, art as sovereign declaration.

Dowling's canvases are indictments of the colonial condition. They speak of exile not as metaphor but as lived reality: Aboriginal families uprooted, relocated, and forced to navigate the alienating geometry of urban Australia.

Her own family's memories are rendered with a painterly tenderness that belies their political weight. These are not quaint vignettes. They are the residue of dispossession.

Dowling's work is steeped in the knowledge that Aboriginal people are not relics of a vanished past, but sovereign beings in a present that continues to deny their rights. Her use of red ochre, gifted by a Badimia elder, is not decorative, it is sacramental. It carries the weight of centuries, the trace of trade routes older than any European map, and the spiritual charge of Barna itself. Wherever these paintings travel, they do so as emissaries of Country.

What makes Guwanda Barna so compelling is its refusal to flatter the viewer. Dowling does not pander to the liberal conscience or offer easy catharsis. She paints with the authority of someone who knows that truth-telling is not a curatorial trend but a cultural imperative.

Her work is a rebuke to the aestheticisation of Aboriginal suffering and a challenge to the art world's penchant for symbolic gestures over structural change.

The exhibition is also not about reconciliation, but recognition. It is about sovereignty never ceded, about the dignity of living as a refugee in one's own land, and about the quiet heroism of those who continue to care for country even as the machinery of modernity grinds on. Dowling honours the Whadjuk Noongar people not with platitudes but with genuine reverence, acknowledging their custodianship while asserting her own ancestral claim.

In an age of curated empathy and institutional amnesia, Guwanda Barna stands as a necessary provocation. It reminds us that art, at its best, is not a balm but a blade—cutting through the fog of denial, slicing open the myths of national innocence, and exposing the raw, unvarnished truth of history.

Dowling, of Badimaya, Irish, and Scottish Catholic descent, is widely recognised for her groundbreaking work blending European portraiture, Indigenous iconography, and political testimony. Born in Subiaco and raised in the Perth area, Dowling has exhibited nationally and internationally, with work held in every major public collection in Australia.

Guwanda Barna (Feeling Country) by Julie Dowling will run from Thursday, 16th of October 2025, to the 9th of November 2025 at Gallows Gallery in Perth.

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