Abstract
The works of Western Desert women artists, such as Kathleen Petyarre, confront the viewer with the embodied reality of Aboriginal culture. These works are intercultural expressions of Aboriginal ways of being, imprinted within the frame of the canvas. This essay explores the implications of Kathleen Petyarre’s paintings for Settler Australians, and the potential for such works to create a greater appreciation of Country. I suggest that the acrylic paintings performed by Western Desert women artists can be understood as both expressions of the Dreaming and as evocations of sensibilities to be experienced and felt by Settler viewers. With reference to Jennifer Biddle’s Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (2007), I maintain that the work of Western Desert women artists departs from the dominant modes of representing Country, Dreaming narratives and Ancestors – instead articulating bodily experiences and expressions particular to Aboriginal women’s ways of being in and knowing the world.
Highlights
The works of Western Desert women artists, such as Kathleen Petyarre, confront the viewer with the embodied reality of Aboriginal culture
It is necessary to briefly examine the construction of Settler identity in colonial discourse to elucidate the context in which the Settler identity encounters Western Desert paintings
Settler Australian identity has been constructed through Settler narratives of ‘self’ that rely on the assumption of fixed identities
Summary
The works of Western Desert women artists, such as Kathleen Petyarre, confront the viewer with the embodied reality of Aboriginal culture. Settler conceptions of self and place – in debt to the legacy of colonial dispossession and subjugation of Aboriginal culture – become destabilised by the articulation of Aboriginal ways of being embodied in Western Desert paintings. Western Desert women artists have appropriated acrylic paints, canvas, the art market and galleries, fracturing the illusions of Settler identity and relations to place.
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