TRACING THE COUNTRY

LIVING LANDSCAPES FROM THE CENTRAL AND WESTERN DESERTS

In the majority of Central and Western Desert communities, many painting styles are centered around landscape, depicted from a birdseye perspective like a map of the artist’s country. For many newcomers and first time collectors of Australian Aboriginal art, this is the key to unlocking and beginning to understand the imagery. 

Unlike a map, however, these landscape aren’t fixed but defined and shaped by living things. Emily Kame Kngwarreye is beloved for her renderings of country by way of the yam, its roots spreading under the surface, or its namesake flowers (Kame) blooming and wilting across country, colouring the surface as they change with the seasons.

Dorothy Napangardi’s Warlpiri country is described by ancestral women, dancing across the desert as digging sticks sprout from the ground. These points are represented by the dotting in most of her work, and this movement is how Dorothy formed the rolling sandhills of her home. Julie Robinson Nangala, Dorothy’s daughter, shares a similar approach in her practice. Barbara Weir learned from and painted aside her mother, Minnie Pwerle. In this beautiful large triptych, Weir employs the style her mother is most known for, in which the marks mimic ceremonial body painting relating to ancestral travel, plants, animals, and natural forces. Here, not only the stewardship of country is passed down, but also visual the language to describe it. This exhibition aims to highlight the language of landscape, depicted through its scars and adornments, the joyous acupuncture of its creation, and its maps leading to essential living water sources and sacred sites. These works are living snapshots, tracing and creating the country anew with each brushstroke, while still following the traces of sacred and essential knowledge passed down.