Yilaan Gaal Gail Garrigarrangu Mudjin by Tully Winona De Vries is the organisational artwork of Community Legal Centres NSW. We commissioned the painting from Tully in late 2025.
Title:
Yilaan Gaal Gail Garrigarrangu Mudjin
This is a mix of Darug and Gamilaroi languages that translates to ‘fresh water salt water family’.
Artist:
Tully Winona De Vries
About the artwork:
This work maps our sector as a living system. Waterways, sky country, and the paths people have travelled to reach us and to change us.
At the centre is community. It holds Community Legal Centres NSW as a peak body, the many different people who make up our sector, and the clients our centres are here for. Everything else in the painting moves out from that centre or returns to it.
The blue lines are salt water and fresh water, running across the whole canvas.
The star designs are sky country, and the ancestors and Elders who connect us to our grassroots history. They are guiding lights for how we want to move through the world and for the changes we believe in.
Two kinds of white line run through the work. The lines marked with stitching are the people whose journeys have brought them to us and to the work of community legal centres. The lines marked with dots are the workers and clients who have travelled with us, and who have changed the way we see the world and the way we do our work.
The flannel flowers are change and resilience. They speak to thriving in the hardest circumstances, and to the healing that can come from justice.
About Tully:
Tully De Vries is a Gamilaroi and Darug single mum and multi-disciplinary artist working in fine art, dance, and poetry. Her work sits at a meeting place between Blak spirituality and the deep questions she keeps returning to about life, death, and her own metaphysical place in the universe. Her previous photographic series catalogued roadkill across the Upper Hunter Valley, a study of death and decay in the Colony.
Through her career in the arts, Tully has facilitated arts programs for young people with the education departments in NSW and Queensland, and run workshops with community arts organisations, dance groups, festivals, and people with disability. She produced and managed programs with the late Rhoda Roberts for the Dreaming Festival and Boomerang at Bluesfest.
Tully has spent years developing her own distinct style of modern Aboriginal art. She paints mostly in acrylic on canvas, and sometimes on found objects. Her strong line work and personal iconography are drawn from her own lived experiences and from her Darug and Gamilaroi cultures. Human silhouettes recur through the paintings, most often women and mothers, and the work is grounded in creation, connection, and community. Community Legal Centres NSW commissioned Tully to create Yilaan Gaal Gail Garrigarrangu Mudjin in 2025.
More of Tully’s work can be found on Instagram via @lost_country_.
Image description for accessibility:
Acrylic painting on a black background, worked in white and bright blue. At the centre is a large circular design: a blue spiral enclosed in concentric rings of dots, dashes and fine line work, ringed by a white halo of short radiating strokes. Wide blue lines banded with white and dotted along their edges flow out from the centre in every direction, curving across the canvas like waterways. Scattered through the black are small circular motifs with spirals at their cores and spokes radiating out, some tight and small, others opening into large starbursts. Fine white dots and dashes trace lines between and around the forms.