Sylvia Ken

Cassandra Bird Paris, supported by Zimmermann, is delighted to present Land and Sky, an outstanding new series of paintings by acclaimed Australian First Nations artist Sylvia Ken. Born in a remote community in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of north-western South Australia, Ken is among Australia’s most compelling contemporary First Nations painters. Land and Sky marks her first solo exhibition in Paris and her first exhibition outside Australia.

At the heart of the exhibition is the Seven Sisters story, an ancestral narrative connected to the constellation known in Western astronomy as the Pleiades. For Ken, this is a true and important story encompassing ancestral law, cultural knowledge and the enduring relationships that connect Aṉangu people to Country. The story follows seven sisters pursued across Country by Wati Nyiru. Guided and protected by the eldest sister, they journey through rockholes, hills, creeks and culturally significant sites before ultimately rising into the sky, where they become stars. In Land and Sky, belts of dotted lines arc across Ken’s compositions like constellations while simultaneously marking the linked rockholes of the sisters’ journey. Land and sky become inseparable: their passage across Country is mapped among the stars.

Through colour, rhythm and composition, Ken creates not only landscapes but timescapes. Layers of dots accumulate across the canvas like ancestral memory, transforming each painting into a meeting place between earth and cosmos, ancestral time and the present.

Over more than two decades, Ken has established a significant career, with works held in major institutional and private collections in Australia and internationally. A multiple finalist in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), she was awarded the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2019, bringing national recognition to the strength and originality of her practice.