Munga Ilkari & Ngayuku Ngura: The Night Sky & My Country from Vicki Cullinan & Betty Chimney
Past exhibition
Yatjiki Vicki Cullinan
Munga Ilkari (Night Sky), 2020
Acrylic on Canvas
122 x 152 cm
840220
At night in the desert, when I look to the sky–heavy with stars, I feel at my most calm. The sky is the largest presence watching these lands. It holds...
At night in the desert, when I look to the sky–heavy with stars, I feel at my most calm. The sky is the largest presence watching these lands. It holds all our ancestral stories from a long time ago. It watches every day what happens in our community; the chaos, the beauty, the hard times, the laughter. The sky see’s and knows everything. It holds all this energy and reflects back on us at night, it is forever and it is still. ”Harnessing a vibrating and explosive energy, Vicki's paintings are jewelled by the repetitive layering of an immense and explosive smattering of considered dots. Charged spaces are treated with lush colourings and heightened tones, which peak against a softly illuminated beauty. The surface of the canvas itself becomes a complex landscape lending to an overall sensation of equilibrium and poetic observations of awareness. Vicki's paintings depict the night sky as living and thriving in abundance, they communicate as much about the landscape below as they do about the sky above. Through these paintings, we begin to comprehend our personal relationship with the environment and solar system as both observant and reflective. The sky keeps shifting, the eye keeps looking, it can never settle for long on a painted energy that is too great to harness. Through the complex intertwining of space, both stillness and movement intertwine. The all encompassing solar system is at once distanced from domestic living, yet at the same time rains down with a fever and energy that is palpable and intoxicating.