Mudburra artist Arthur (Jalyirri) Dixon (b. 1994) grew up in the remote Northern Territory community of Marlinja, near Elliott, around 700 km from both Alice Springs and Darwin. He grew up in a creative family, using music for storytelling and a vehicle for keeping Mudburra, one of the world’s oldest languages, alive. Both his father Ray Dimakarri Dixon and sister Eleanor Dixon are accomplished singer/songwriters.

Arthur employs gestural mark-making in evocative abstract paintings which are both large and small-scale. He generally paints off-stretcher and his work features both subtle tonal shifts and contrasting pigments, some areas of canvas left raw.

Arthur uses the Mudburra word ngurramarla to describe his work, a term which refers to ancestral connection and the channeling of creativity through this connection. It’s a term which reflects the heightened state of Arthur’s expressive act of painting and, in turn, his underlying inspiration to connect with and care for Country. Arthur’s paintings are mostly untitled and highly intuitive rather than literal in their expression of ngurramarla. Ngurramarla was the title given to his first two paintings to be publicly exhibited, as part of the 2023 DesertMob exhibition in Alice Springs – an indication of his emerging status and remarkable freedom and confidence as a painter.