Memories from the desert
As I walked up the stairs inside the gallery of First Draft West, having first passed through the lower rooms and their exhibitions, my eye was caught by a strong blue image. The intensity and luminescence of colour of the first of a line of drawings attracted me to the space. Around the walls, at sitting eye level, ran a horizontal line of drawings intersected by a series of vertical panels of text. In the centre of the floor a circular mound of ochre divided and joined two panels of text that lay on the floor. I had entered a place of story telling.
The story being told was that of the women of the desert; two sets of women. Intertwined with each other were the stories of Aboriginal women and their communities, and the story of the artist. The installation engendered a strong sense of their presence.
The text was printed on tracing paper, lending a sense of impermanence and of transparent materiality to the exhibition. The words, and the images of places and people that they evoked, are far from impermanent-one gained a sense of the strength and survival of the community of women in the desert with whom the artist has been involved. What emerged was a mingling of the stories of the Dreaming with the stories of the women 's lives . There was the same tempo and logic of telling: stories of how it was, came about, and is. The recent stories told of how the present had been created-the relationship with mining, with white people, the food, the grog, the machinery. But there was more-the way the women tell the stories-their hold on their