Beyond Everlasting (UGUDUNGU)

Beyond Everlasting UGUDUNGU sits at the centre of the current exhibition at Aboriginal Bush Traders, bringing together a powerful intergenerational story carried by five women artists from the same family across three generations. The work speaks to continuity, memory, and the strength of cultural knowledge held within family, and passed forward through making, teaching, and shared experience.

UGUDUNGU, as expressed in this major piece, reflects both cultural inheritance and personal journey. For Dr Faye Parriman, earlier iterations of this work—painted in her own practice—formed part of a long process of healing following her experience as part of the Stolen Generations. In this sense, the work is not only artistic expression, but also an act of reclaiming connection, identity, and continuity where disruption once occurred.

As the work has evolved into a collaborative creation with her daughters and granddaughters, it now holds multiple voices at once. The layered contributions of the five artists trace a living lineage of knowledge and practice, where story is not static but continually renewed. Each hand adds to a shared language of form and meaning, strengthening the thread between past and future.

Beyond Everlasting gestures to this continuum: the idea that cultural strength endures not through preservation alone, but through ongoing transformation and care. In bringing together personal healing and collective expression, the work stands as both testimony and offering—holding grief, resilience, and connection within a single, evolving field of making.