Kieren Karritpul – Falmikuri Mermaid 2026

• Size: 30.5 x 23 cm
• Medium: Acrylic on pre-stretched canvas

Mermaid 

In our country there are female water spirits with fish tails we call falmikuri, they are like mermaids. They live in freshwater, in special places. They live in my mum’s country at Malfiyin (Moil River, north of Nauiyu). Some are beautiful and some are ugly. Some have long black hair and others have really long white hair. When they are underwater, their tails are coloured like rainbows, they shine, iridescent like fish. They live forever and can use magic to transform their appearance. Some can look young, but when you marry them they turn back into an old lady. Sometimes they can impersonate relatives to trick you into following them.

They are very dangerous for boys, as they enter puberty. The falmikuri might attempt to coax young men into the water, because they want them to go and live with them. Wherever you see a beautiful waterfall, it’s probably because they are using magic to make it beautiful to lure young men into the water to swim. The old people tell young boys, be very careful when you are swimming, you don’t want to be captured.

Sometimes we go camping at those places old people can feel they are there in the billabongs and creeks/rivers. Where there are a lot of leeches, it’s a sign that there are mermaids around. There are particular sites where they are active – one is just up the river from Nauiyu it’s called Labuganying (Fish River).

Only the people who have falmikuri on their traditional homelands are allowed to paint them. When we draw them, we don’t give them faces. You can’t show them as human, only draw the tail and draw circles on the face. The old people said that if you draw a face or a hand, in the future you might have kids without eyes or hands.

Copyright: Kieren Karritpul and Merrepen Arts

Artist Bio – Kieren Karritpul

Kieren Karritpul is an outstanding, award winning artist who work has been featured in solo exhibitions with Nomad (Darwin) and Tolarno Galleries (Melbourne) and group exhibitions around the world. His most recent solo exhibition was YERR WURRKEME MARRGU in May 2025 at Tolarno. See the exhibition here.

• Born 1994, lives and works in Nauiyu, Daly River, Northern Territory, Australia
• Traditional Country: Malfiyin
• Language: Ngen’gi wumirri

In Daly River artist Kieren Karritpul’s art there is no escaping the woven lines of inspiration. The woven form is both subject and metaphor in his work, and also to some extent part of their process. In his first solo exhibition, Karritypul, the titles of his paintings, prints and textile-based work all indicated a particular woven form including the yerggi which is actually a pre-woven form, yerrgi being the Daly River word (Ngan’gikurrungurr language) for the ubiquitous pandanus plant, the Screw Palm, Pandanus spiralis which together with the Sand Palm (merrepen, Livistona humilis) are the main sources of fibre for Top End weavers….

In these abstracted views, the woven form almost becomes mandala-like with the imagery built up from radiating bands of short parallel lines. In this sense the line can be seen as a faithful transposition of the coil weave technique rather than the traditionally longer, looser stitches though it is in effect more about Kieren’s visual-poetic licence in the process of translating one form into another to become something much more than what it represents; to transcend.

– Maurice O’Riordan, Director, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, 2015 (Woven Lines catalogue essay excerpts)