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In association with Kaltjiti Arts, we’re very pleased to present a tight selection of new works from six of their female artists: Beverly Cameron, Ingrid Treacle, Rosemary Peters, Teresa Yipati Stevens, Linda Stevens, and Priscilla Phillipus.
I’ve spent recent months pondering the transmission of knowledge and culture across time and societies, and I have been unable to escape how tied to the written word European-origin cultures are. This is in stark contrast to many First Nations cultures. Whatever cultural artefacts one encounters in the West, our experience of it is enabled largely through the written word. Our judicial systems can’t function without it and our cultural sphere would collapse without the written word of the theorists and critics. As I type, I am acutely aware of the irony of relying on the written word to explain my ideas about these paintings.
Whenever we encounter paintings by Indigenous artists, like these from Kaltjiti, we are presented not only with an aesthetic experience but with a valid and important means of transmitting culture and knowledge. Where decades and millennia ago Central Desert peoples would use sand and body painting to convey meaning, contemporary peoples use acrylic and canvas. The intent is the same but the medium has changed and the audience has broadened.
What we see as essentially an act of artistic expression is in fact far deeper for the artists. These six Kaltjiti women are on the one hand creating beautiful work for our enjoyment, while also handing us texts containing the keys of their culture. These texts may not be immediately legible to eyes schooled in a Latin alphabet; however meaning begins to reveal itself with study and a willingness to think differently.
While the artists are generous in their sharing of cultural and traditional knowledge, they are not giving us unfettered access to the inner sanctum of their religious beliefs, although they do allow us a public view if we care to look.
Australia has a long history of dismissing the veracity of painted texts. For example, First Nations peoples have had to battle long and hard to prove their validity as allowable evidence for Native Title court cases. In one significant landmark case, the WA government finally allowed the Spinifex people to submit paintings as documentary evidence of their ongoing connection to country in the absence of “traditional” legal instruments like title deeds and birth certificates. These paintings were equivalent to 50,000 years’ worth of volumes of scholarly writing, historic and genealogical records, constitutions, religious texts and geographic and cosmological maps.
It is time that we started to see these paintings for what they really are: cultural texts. That is not to say we cannot enjoy their great aesthetic beauty; we’d be foolish not to and the artists want us to see the beauty of their Country and culture, too. To understand the dual nature of these paintings is to experience their full power and to acknowledge the enduring primacy of First Nations people to this continent and their unique knowledge systems.
In these Kaltjiti paintings the writing is literally on the wall. When we are willing to accept Indigenous painting as a different and highly sophisticated writing system, we not only expand our understanding of humanity, we deepen our knowledge of ourselves and transcend the cultural shackles that privilege received scripts over symbolic ones. We stand to gain so much more from an equal exchange of knowledge and culture.
