Literature in our Collection
(M-Z)

Watson, Christine: Piercing the Ground. Balgo women's image making and relationship to country, Fremantle 2003, ISBN 192073130X

Table of Contents        ¦         Cover Text        ¦         Book Review

Table of Contents

List of Plates -6-

Acknowledgements -10-

Introduction -13-

Glimpses of Balgo -33-

Unravelling Layers of Being and Thought -49-

Touching the Ground: Public Sand Drawing -70-

Contemporary Painting: Practice and History 1979-2001 -109-

Touching and the Structures of Ceremony -166-

Touching and Ancestors: the Nakarra Nakarra Dreaming Track -201-

Dialogue and Transformation: Paintings of the Nakarra Nakarra Dreaming Track -237-

Becoming the Dreaming -290-

Figures -301-

Appendix: Nakarra Nakarra Song Cycle -352-

Notes -358-

Glossary -377-

Bibliography -382-

Index -393-

Cover Text

With its sense that the stunning paintings from the Western Desert bear more than meets the eye, Christine Watson's 'Piercing the Ground' stands as a highly original and groundbreaking elucidation of Kutjungka painting and a significant addition to what is known as 'the anthropology of art'. A fitting tribute to her indigenous mentors, this book should change the way people regard contemporary acrylic painting. Watson insists we understand this image making not only in its own cosmological terms as a kind of 'marking', but in all of its radical difference from representational practices familiar to western world views. This image making, she shows, is more of a 'piercing' than a 'painting' and must be grasped as integrally involving the totality of the senses, treating the skin of the body and the surface of the land as equivalent, and in this way producing its own truth. This is the kind of work that stretches our imaginations.