Janice Stanley - APY Lands Aboriginal Artist
Janice Stanley is one of the most distinctive painters working in Australia today. Her work is immediately recognisable - vivid, fluid and wholly unlike anything else emerging from the APY Lands. She paints Pantu, a salt lake near Mt Connor in the APY Lands of South Australia, in a style that is entirely her own: sweeping colour fields, organic aerial forms and a surface energy that sets her apart from any other painter in contemporary Aboriginal art.
Art by Farquhar holds one of the most significant collections of Janice Stanley's work available through any gallery in Australia. We work directly with Janice and her family.
Country and family
Janice Stanley was born on 13 December 1987 and is the third generation of Stanley women to paint in Pukatja (Ernabella), APY Lands, South Australia. Her grandmother is Tjariya Stanley - a founding artist and traditional healer - and her aunts are senior artists Alison Milyika Carroll and Renita Stanley. When Janice was still at school, she would watch her grandmother and aunties at work.
The APY Lands - Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara - cover more than 100,000 square kilometres of arid country in the northwest of South Australia. They are the traditional homelands of the Anangu people, who have maintained continuous connection to this country and its Dreaming stories for tens of thousands of years. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognises the APY Lands as one of the most significant regions of living cultural practice in Australia. Our APY Lands page provides more context on the region and its traditions.
Pantu and the Seven Sisters
Janice Stanley paints Pantu - the salt lakes situated near Attila (Mt Connor), close to the Northern Territory border. These lakes are a significant landmark in the Seven Sisters Dreaming - Kungkarangkalpa in Pitjantjatjara - one of the oldest and most widespread creation stories in Aboriginal Australia. In this part of the story, the seven sisters travel south through the arid country, creating landforms in their wake. Pantu is one of those landforms. To paint it is to paint a living map of ancestral knowledge - not a record of the past but an act of cultural maintenance in the present.
In the Anangu tradition, Dreaming stories are known as Tjukurpa - the living law that governs relationships between people, country and the ancestral beings who created the landscape. To understand what Janice Stanley's paintings are doing, it helps to understand what the Dreaming actually means - not a period of time, but a living reality connecting the present moment to the act of creation.
A style entirely her own
What makes Janice Stanley genuinely exceptional is that her visual language is unlike anything else in contemporary Aboriginal art. She paints in flowing, abstract colour fields - organic aerial forms that move across the canvas like water across a salt flat, like light shifting across country through the day. The inspiration for this distinctive bird's eye view came from flying over her country and seeing the salt lakes from the air - that aerial perspective became the lens through which she paints Pantu.
Collections and recognition
Janice Stanley's work has attracted serious institutional recognition. Her paintings are held in the Australian Parliament House Art Collection in Canberra, the Janet Holmes à Court Collection in Perth and the Australian Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia. She has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, with shows in Brussels, Berlin, Sydney, Adelaide, Alice Springs, Broome and Perth.
This level of institutional recognition for an artist born in 1987 is remarkable. It reflects both the cultural weight of what she is painting and the formal strength with which she paints it. The market for her work has strengthened consistently as her profile has grown, and major works are becoming increasingly difficult to acquire.
Collecting Janice Stanley
Janice Stanley's work is held in significant private and public collections in Australia and internationally. Collectors who acquire her work tend to hold it - not simply as an investment, but because living with a major Janice Stanley canvas is a sustained and deepening experience. The more you understand the country, the story and the artist, the more the painting gives back.
Art by Farquhar works directly with Janice Stanley and her family. Every work comes with a Certificate of Authenticity documenting the artist and her connection to the story depicted.
You may also wish to explore our pages on the APY Lands, the Seven Sisters Dreaming and What is Aboriginal Art for broader context on the tradition Janice Stanley works within.