the work of kathleen petyarre
In the notes for his Autobiographies the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote that 'true poetry had to be the speech of the whole man. lt was not sufficient that it was the artful expression of daylight opinion and conviction; it had to emerge from a more profound consciousness and be, in the words of his friend Arthur Symons, the voice of "the mystery which lies about us, out of which we have come and into which we shall return".'
I turn to Yeats as a clue to discovering a secret about the painting of Kathleen Petyarre because his artistic project, much like Andrei Tarkovsky in the cinema, encompassed the expression of a profound mysticism and a national will. And because his art was founded in a Western canon (of Plato, Shakespeare, Milton) combined with a racial (Celtic) folklore-ism . Petyarre works with a traditional indigenous art form (western desert sand 'painting') and narrative symbology that is represented through a canonic Western idiom-painting on canvas.
Petyarre's painting depicts tribal dreaming stories connected to her home in the Atnangker country. These stories emphasise her own inalienable connection with the land at that place, as well as reflecting a history of struggles for Indigenous land rights in which she has been involved since the seventies-much like Yeats inviolable Irish 'nationalism.' Her dreaming narrative is of Arnkerrth, the Old Woman Mountain Devil or the Thorny Devil Lizard. In the exhibition catalogue Petyarre describes her work. 'In my paintings Arnkerrth is walking, through her country, getting ready for ceremony, for girl and young boys too. A long walk! On her back, carrying everything-special red ochre for ceremony, seeds everything. She's crossing over other Dreaming, all