Since the eighties Paddy has produced a diversity of Aboriginal Artworks including paintings and carvings of spirit figures and serpents. His use of mediums range from bark, hollow log coffins, lithograph prints, canvas and linen.

Applications of both ochre and acrylic are common in his works. Varying circle and dot techniques feature strongly. Paddy’s unique style of working with plain backgrounds and crooked borders has become somewhat of a trademark, and his depiction of Mimi Spirits (ancestral teachers) internationally renowned. He frequently depicts dancing Mimi Spirits referring to them as good spirits and protectors of country.

Paddy Fordham grew up in Maningrida where as a young boy he worked in nearby cattle yards. At the age of thirteen he moved to Maranboy Station where he spent the next twenty years working as a stockman. Paddy learnt his traditional culture and customs from his father and four uncles and remembers hunting kangaroos and goannas, being taken to secret locations and being told many Dreamtime stories.

Fordham witnessed the beginnings of the Aboriginal struggle for equal rights, the homelands movement and land rights, and has explored all of these themes in his paintings and stories, thus playing a major role in revealing history from a unique, traditional Aboriginal perspective. Paddy also depicts creation ancestors responsible for Rembarrnga culture and land. He has worked on paper, bark and canvas as well as making distinctive spirit figure sculptures.

Paddy Fordham is recognised as a storyteller, bark painter, sculptor, dancer, singer and musician. He was one of the artists to contribute several burial poles, to the ‘Aboriginal Memorial’ installation made from 200 painted hollow logs, symbolising 200 years of white occupation of Australia, which was part of the 1988 Biennale of Sydney. This installation has since been exhibited overseas including in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and is on permanent display in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Sadly Paddy Fordham passed away on the 1^st of June 2006.