weathers of the mind
Weathers of the Mind is Judy Holding 's most recent exhibition and, according to the artist, her most important. Among the more familiar images drawn from her experiences in the Top End, she has inserted highly personal references to significant occasions in her ongoing relationships with Aboriginal families in the Kakadu area. This risk in exposing the personal is compounded by the more general ethical dilemmas that arise when white artists' programs are driven by encounters with Indigenous peoples and cultures. Holding is one of an increasing number of such artists-some from interstate, but mostly Territory based- whose art practice is grounded in relationships with Territory Aboriginal people and their land. Their art has been honed by this experience and knowledge, but also has been questioned as parasitic, in the sense of being created by the energy of a host culture that is somehow compromised as a result. Behind the latter position is the assumption that a white artist does not (indeed cannot) bring anything of value or resource to cultural relations with Indigenous people or even to their own personal creative output. Such an assumption is challenged today by artists whose practice has matured in a context of cross-cultural awareness and friendships, over a long period. Indeed, in the case of postMabo white artists in the Northern Territory, it could be argued that in tackling head-on the still fraught interface between black and white, the pitfalls and even the mistakes by these artists are integral steps in the process of weaving the kinds of social relations which will issue in a more profound and more reciprocal engagement between Indigenous and settler people. Certainly the artists who take such risks