Cathy's Art Diary

Beautiful but impenetrable exhibition at Tate Modern looking at the indigenous Australian artist, Emily Kan Kngwarray.   Given this art would be new to a lot of the audience who were viewing it I felt it could have been explained more clearly. It is only from looking at the website now that I realise the artist didn’t start producing art until her 70s and I never found a good explanation of her technique. The descriptions of the belief system behind the works and the concept of ‘Dreamers’ were confusing and relied on an acceptance of strange ideas rather than clear explanation. Having said that I found the works themselves tranquil a nd beautiful. They mainly consisted of dots of paint obscuring an image below. Some felt like maps. I loved the intense colours and how they reacted together. Inevitably to a European eye they make you think of Pointillism not helped by the fact there is a Pointillist show at the National Gallery at the moment.   The paintings were shown wi...

Interesting display at the British Museum of aboriginal memorial poles, or larrakitj, made by Wuken Wanambi. Larrakitj are traditionally used as coffins in Northern Australia once a body had decomposed and are placed in the landscape as a memorial. These examples are however made as art works and the group are called Wetjwitj. There are made in threes to show the processes involved. The design shows sea mullets which represent the clan, currents in the water and the power of the bay. The artist visited the British Museum and saw the Reading Room as a memorial pole in the centre of the museum and visitors quests for meaning like the mullet in the bay. This was at interesting precursor to the forthcoming Aboriginal show at the museum.