Literature in our Collection
(A-L)

Biddle, Jennifer Loureide: Breasts, Bodies, Canvas. Central Desert Art as Experience, Sydney 2007, ISBN 9780868409948

Table of Contents        ¦         Cover Text        ¦         Book Review

Table of Contents

Yarla: A story about a painting -7-

Introduction -11-

A word on affect -15-

Why women? -24-

1: on writing -30-

Emily Kngwarreye -39-

Utopia panels -41-

Plates 1-32

2: the imprint -54-

No surface is 'blak' -61-

The imprint -67-

The shimmering -69-

Rosie Napurrurla Tasman -75-

3: on skin -79-

Kathleen Petyarre -80-

Dorothy Napangardi -86-

A different 'epidermal schema'? -91-

4: on breasts -95-

Notes -108-

Bibliography -112-

Acknowledgements -120-

Image Permissions -122-

Index -128-

Cover Text

'Breasts, Bodies, Canvas' radically reinterprets Central Desert art. These paintings are not just aesthetically pleasing, they evoke crucial bodily sensations and sensibilities. Anthropologist Jennifer Loureide Biddle focuses on what this art 'does' rather than what it 'means'. Breaking with a generation of scholarship that has identified these works as traditional symbolic representations of country, Biddle opens up a new path for understanding these works as material forces of culture, sentiment and politics. The encounter with Aboriginal art is understood to be a sensuous engagement with cultural differences as a lived reality. This book examines the rise of female Aboriginal artists, including Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kathleen Petyarre, Dorothy Napangardi, Rosie Napurrurla Tasman and others, and the tactile and sensory activities involved in painting. Biddle argues that the recent success of women painters points to a certain 'feminisation' of country, Ancestor and Dreaming that makes this art literally enlivened and enlivening.