Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

61 Gulumbu Yunupingu: Ancient light Elina Spilia Dark matter, particle physics, neutrinos. Conjecture surrounds the origins and nature of the universe. Behind the familiar turning of constellations, in the darkness between and beyond the stars, the edge of the known universe disappears. Here, we encounter the ends of Western science. Certainty gives way to speculation and belief, drawing conversations into the last embers of campfires and into the early hours before dawn when Venus rises over the eastern horizon. The Yolngu landowners of north-east Arnhem Land reserve this time for the song and ceremony of banumbirr, the morning star. Women gather to cry the religious songs that break the night and re-enact the ancestral dawn. Their voices usher the passage of the morning star as it travels westward, pulling tendrils of birdsong and sunlight into the lightening sky. Their crying draws out the stillness of the night and cuts crescendos through the cold air before falling back into a weeping murmur that encapsulates both lament and celebration. As the weeping liturgy fades, the growing glow of the sky absorbs the glint and shimmer of the stars. The universe shifts between visibility and invisibility as if mirroring our uncertainties. From our vantage point, the sky is fluid, changing hour by hour as constellations move across our field of view. Gulumbu Yunupingu’s veils of stars on shifting fields of ochre evoke the particularities of night skies affected by cloud cover and weather, time and season. She painstakingly applies hundreds of painted crosses interspersed with thousands of tiny dots onto eucalypt logs hollowed by termites and sheets of bark, producing starscapes inflected with endless, subtle changes in colour and tone. The sculptural qualities of Yunupingu’s works are inviting and enveloping: her hollow logs appear to have no edges; we are encircled by her night skies as we wander through a forest of painted logs, observing seemingly infinite constellations rotating around us. The transitions between day and night and the transformative qualities of light and darkness offer revelatory moments in the sacred traditions of Yolngu people. The moments in which the universe fades into and out of visual perception are marked by an achingly beautiful aesthetic that folds light, colour, shade and shadow into metaphoric and metaphysical dimensions underpinned by the strictures of ancestral law. Each night, the universe begins to appear star by star until, all in a rush, like a river gaining speed, the heavens are crowded with the galaxies of the Milky Way. Yolngu attribute profound significance to the celestial landscape above north-east Arnhem Land, which they regard to be causally proximate, powerful and replete with an ancestral agency evidenced by the endless variation of the night sky. Assisted by the earth’s rotation, a constellation of ancestral men paddle a canoe westwards in pursuit of a cluster of sisters. Two quarrelling women sit beside the smoky fires of the Magellanic clouds, periodically reconciling around a single camp when one galaxy seasonally dips beyond the horizon. For Yolngu, attuned to the significance of astronomical bodies, the heavens are alive with activity. The characteristic painting styles of north-east Arnhem Land use figuration and design in isolation or juxtaposition to provide paintings with an illustrative emphasis, or which hold sacred juridical authority by virtue of being inscribed with ancestral designs. Yunupingu was among the first painters working in the Yirrkala region to radically depart from these styles and, although other artists have similarly distilled the Yolngu visual lexicon into a single, repeated icon, Gulumbu’s work is unique. It is distinguished by her transposition of a new, secular painting style into a conceptual practice Gulumbu Yunupingu Gumatj/Rrakpala people NT b.1945 Garak, the Universe (detail) 2004 Natural pigments on bark 174 x 59cm Acc. 2005.008 Purchased 2008