FEBRUARY 2024 EXHIBITION / LAYI BY IRENE HENRY AND HAROLD GOODMAN
OPENING 10 FEBRUARY 2024 AT 10AM
We’re proud to present a fancy flock of 40 birds in our first exhibition for the year. The personality of each bird is informed by the shape of the wood and how it speaks to the artists.
Laundry Gallery presents Layi, our second solo show by Irene Henry and Harold Goodman. Finalists in the 2022 NATSIA awards, these highschool sweethearts are a creative force to be reckoned with.
“Layi means the Kakadu Plum. At Kakadu National Park, when you see cockatoo, they would be on the tree and eating that Kakadu plum on that tree. Yeah. So we call it LAYI in our language, Minitja language.”
“One day Harold said to me he was going to carve cockatoos… he uses Wolly bark or Stringy Bark. He makes the crest different. The one from Tiwi, they make it small, a small crest. Our ones, he makes it more bigger, longer. When he was doing that carving he said, oh, I'm gonna make bigger crest, you know. Then he just went and done it.”
“When we go out to cut, we'll see a log on the ground. And we can just go and we can just picture that bird already. So then Harold said, cut this, cut that. And then when he takes it back, he just makes it the way he wants it to be…”
Laundry Gallery presents LAYI, our second solo show by Irene Henry and Harold Goodman. Finalists in the 2022 NATSIA awards, these highschool sweethearts are a creative force to be reckoned with.
Every year they collaborate on hundreds of Ngarradj (Sulphur Crested Cockatoos), Karnamarr (Red Tailed Black Cockatoos) and WirliWirlih (Galah) sculptures, sharing the work, designs and stories with several members of their extended family.