The Wanarn Travellers of Space and Time

The Hubble telescope peers into the furthest reaches of the galaxy to photograph the far edges of space. The scientists who run it are looking for the secrets that animate the universe. They want to know its age, speed and direction. They also want to know what it is made of. The Hubble images have become famous not because they contain these secrets, but because they are beautiful, striking some deep chord within the human soul. It is as if we have seen these spiral galaxies, gas clouds and galactic arms before, as if there is something in the galaxy's reaches that we recognise.

It may be too simple to say that the painters of Wanarn produce the same effect, that their images also resonate with some pattern of life buried just beneath the surface of the universe. The irony here is that the Hubble required decades of technological effort, to make the most expensive and laborious pictures in the history of humanity. The Wanarn paintings are by comparison accomplished with ease, painted over tea or television, on the veranda or in bed. Yet these paintings also build a bridge from the depths within to the universe beyond. They are magical paintings, as with dazzling tricks of the brush they create puzzles that seduce the eye with their simplicity and mystery.

As the Hubble mirrors were being conceived, and first contact was taking place in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, the French philosopher Roger Caillois proposed there was only a finite number of images in the world. This is why the shape of an eagle lies in a turtle's shell, or a map in the lines of a hand. The Wanarn paintings and the Hubble photographs lie on the same continuum, speaking through the strata of the cosmos with patterns that are of the universe. Their lines are the lines that can only recombine in a limited number of ways, and that bind the freedom of the universe to their fluid movement between stars.

While the Hubble scientists peer into their screens and devices, the Wanarn painters travel these lines, these patterns, without leaving their place in the deep desert of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. From here they can see everything. They can look back upon the country and up into the depths of the sky. Theirs is the joy of a universe that is held by the touch of a paintbrush, opening up wormholes into the night. They are the metaphysicians of the early twenty-first century, tracing lines that have no beginning or end, showing us keys to doors of which we can only have the most faint conception. The great mystery of these paintings is that we recognise them, that their patterns echo with a significance we cannot name. For truth is never a part of something else but can only be itself, lain before and beyond everything that we know.

Darren Jorgensen
University of Western Australia

An exhibition of works by Wanarn artists opens this weekend at Aboriginal and Pacific Art.

DETAILS
Paintings from Warakurna and Wanarn

Exhibition dates: 22nd November - 10th December 2011

Opening: Saturday 26th November 3-6pm

Address:
2 Danks St
Waterloo/Sydney

Tel: 02 9699 2211
Email: info@aboriginalpacificart.com.au

Painting:

Mirlirrtjarra 2011 by Ben Holland. 762mm x 762mm acrylic on canvas