Ii ra mer ene Gawei (the sounds of tears and Gawei)

Daniel O’Shane is one of the younger artists from the Torres Strait Islands working with printmaking. While he only began studying through Cairns TAFE in 2009 he has already received wide acclaim, recently being awarded both the Silk Cut Award Grand Prize and the National Works on Paper Prize for his print ‘Aib ene zogo ni pat (Aib and the sacred waterhole)’. He was also a finalist in the 2015 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, with his work, ‘Meuram and Zogo ni Pat’ 2015. His major works are informed by complex narratives of Torres Strait Islander culture. The works themselves become a form of storytelling capturing the main protagonists and the events with which they are connected.
O’Shane is an extremely technical printmaker, his proficient carving and animated illustrations reflecting the grand details of the narratives he is documenting. The dramatic scale of his prints allow this complexity, with shifts in the background patterning creating a sense of movement and dynamism – that the actions being referenced as still in play today. ‘Ii ra mer ene Gawei (the sound of tears and Gawei)’ 2016 details how the pelican mouth shape drum design came to be in the Torres Strait.