[AstroNet] Astronomy meets Art

[Sam Rametse]

*Astronomy project unites indigenous artists from WA and South Africa *



*(http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/astronomy-project-unites-indigenous-artists-from-wa-and-south-africa/story-fn9n8gph-1227070209780?nk=3b1d2a771b9dbea54d192cf83787bee5
<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/astronomy-project-unites-indigenous-artists-from-wa-and-south-africa/story-fn9n8gph-1227070209780?nk=3b1d2a771b9dbea54d192cf83787bee5>)*



*A GROUP of scientists and artists is peering heavenwards on a starlit
night at remote Boolardy Station, 700km northeast of Perth. Astronomer
Steven Tingay, director of Curtin University’s Institute of Radio
Astronomy, follows the upward gesture of Yamaji artist Charmaine Green as
she points to one part of the starry firmament. She directs him and his
scientific colleagues to look closely and tell her what they see.*

The scientists’ eyes are drawn to bright pinpricks of light; they connect
star to star, ordering them into constellations and audibly reciting their
names — Orion, Southern Cross, Milky Way. In this manner, across Western
civilisation, generations of stargazers have steadfastly sought celestial
order amid the brightness.

But Green and her fellow artists exhort their guests to look again. Look
for the darkest spots, Green urges, and form them in your mind’s eye into a
figure. Sure enough, a long, elegant emu figure reveals itself among the
dark clouds of the Milky Way. The scientists soon find themselves
recognising it easily, both in the night sky and in the art of Yamaji
artists whose work is shown to them.

“There are certain times of year we look up at the sky and we look to the
dark places,” says Green. “We see the emu become visible around the emu
egg-laying time and we know we can gather the eggs.” She observes: “It’s
interesting that we look at the same sky, yet everyone’s not looking at
what others see.”

Tingay was one of the instigators of this cross-disciplinary outing,
conducted on West Australian land allocated for the world’s biggest radio
telescope project, called the Square Kilometre Array.

“We’re using telescopes to reach out to the most distant reaches of the
universe and discover things never seen before,” says Tingay. “And we’re
doing that from this really ancient landscape that’s been under the
ownership of the Wajarri Yamaji people for tens of thousands of years.”

The $2 billion Square Kilometre Array is a global megascience project to
develop the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope; it is being
built in remote locations in Australia and South Africa by a consortium of
11 countries.

The choice of a remote pastoral station in Western Australia makes sense
when you are trying to listen to the faintest “whispers” in space.
Murchison Shire is the size of the Netherlands. It has a population of just
110 people, little radio noise, few cars and almost no electric fences,
microwave ovens or mobile phones.

“It’s one of the quietest places on Earth,” explains Tingay. “If you look
at a map of the globe that shows manmade radio interference, there’s this
very clear patch over Western Australia.”

Next week, more than 300 astronomers and space engineers will converge on
Perth to discuss the SKA, its scope and final design. Some will travel
north to Boolardy Station to inspect the Murchison Widefield Array, one of
Australia’s precursor SKA installations that uses futuristic science to
look back toward the earliest moments of our universe.

“We’re also looking towards the galactic centre, at supernova remnants,”
says Tingay, who is director of the MWA. Images from the MWA’s
low-frequency radio array have already delivered much new information.
“We’ve increased the number of known exploded stars in our galaxy by at
least 20, which is just amazing.”

The fact the SKA will straddle two continents means it will impact on the
lands of two indigenous peoples — the Yamaji of Western Australia, and the
San people of South Africa’s Karoo region in Eastern Cape Province. It has
led to the *Shared Sky*exhibition, a celebration of the cosmology-centred
art of both groups, opening in the John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University
in Perth.

In a central gallery, huge time-lapse images show the elegant tracking by
radio telescopes across the sky. But in galleries on each side, indigenous
Australian and South African artists express their celestial beliefs
through acrylic paintings, textile quilts, sculptural installations and
even on carved emu and ostrich eggs.

“They show how a sophisticated understanding of celestial mechanics
resonates with the work of living artists,” says Chris Malcolm, director of
John Curtin Gallery, who curated the show. “And they are sharing those
insights with scientists working to unlock the secrets of the universe.”

A small *SKA* art exhibition was held in 2009 but this is a far more
ambitious show. Green, who runs Yamaji Art Centre in Geraldton, about 400km
north of Perth, says more than 20 local artists have produced 60 works that
“look beyond our own tradition, because we have seen through telescopes,
we’ve googled and we’ve researched constellations, new galaxies and
nebulas”.

“We’re still interested in our stories of how we see the sky but we’re
looking at how astronomers are talking to us about their perceptions of the
sky. A lot of artists are excited by the idea of looking at the sky
differently.” These forays into Western astronomy have led to paintings
with titles such as *Betelgeuse*, *Hydra* and *Corvus*.

Emu eggs carved with depictions of the Milky Way have been matched with
collaborative “map” paintings of night star clusters, the first such images
produced by Yamaji artists.

Emblematic of this new inspiration is a work Tingay lists among his
favourites. It’s a sculpture of spindle-like radio antennas cascading from
sky to Earth, or from gallery ceiling to floor. “Charmaine saw we’d
discarded antennas which we no longer needed,” recalls Tingay, “and she
said, ‘We can do something with them.’ She wrapped them up in different
colours of wool, inspired by protecting what’s precious.”

In another gallery is the work of 20 South African artists from Bethesda
Arts Centre, in Nieu Bethesda, not far from the site of the South African
SKA prototype. Malcolm says the Yamaji and San share aspects of creation
stories dating back thousands of years, reflected in the appearance of the
Milky Way in artworks from both Africa and Australia.

Bethesda’s director, artist Jeni Couzyn, set up the art centre to
“reintroduce a sense of identity to disinherited people of mixed descent,
and to facilitate them to become artists”.

The artists — many of them members of what were formerly called Bushmen
tribes — have grown up in an area of Africa littered with astonishing rock
engravings. The startling etched images, which will also be displayed at
John Curtin Gallery, point to a tradition of star-watching dating back
20,000 years.

But large embroidered quilts have become the art centre’s forte, “a way of
expressing and exploring the rich meaning of the San creation mythology
within the context of the artists’ contemporary lives”. Seven quilts will
be displayed in *Shared Sky*.

Among a small group of South African artists who, with Couzyn, will visit
Perth for the exhibition is textile and print maker Sandra Sweers, whose
San roots, which for years were the cause of extreme discrimination, have
become a source of artistic inspiration. Another is 24-year-old Gerald Mei
who, according to Couzyn, is among several San artists who have triumphed
over tough upbringings, township life and alcoholism to succeed as artists.

Curator Malcolm says he marvels that indigenous cultures have long accepted
“there is more that exists in the universe than is visible as points of
light”. Yet Western science has only relatively recently embraced
challenging notions such as “dark matter” and “dark energy”.

Commissioned by the Australian and South African governments and the
international SKA Organisation, *Shared Sky* will travel to five continents
in the next two years to celebrate the SKA project. Eventually, a book will
accompany the exhibition on its orbit. “It will have all sorts of experts
talking about indigenous astronomy and ancient populations’ understanding
of celestial mechanics,” Malcolm says.

For Tingay, new experiences have emerged from his professional fellowship
with Green. “Charmaine pushed us all out of our comfort zones — she even
had us writing poetry about the experience and performing it, which was
pretty confronting for me.”

Perhaps fittingly, the radio-derived images assembled so far from the
Murchison Widefield Array resemble radiant dots on a dark canvas,
interspersed with faint bubble structures and complicated clouds of gas
with magnetic fields.

“Each of these dots is another galaxy millions or billions of light years
away,” says Tingay. “These are objects way outside our galaxy.”

Green and the Yamaji artist group say they will continue to track the
progress of the world’s biggest astronomy project on their doorstep, not
least because — unlike many mining operations in the region — “the beauty
of the breakaway country will still remain”.

Wajarri elder and artist Kevin Merritt describes it thus: “It fascinates me
because look at me here, a grain of sand in the whole universe. The size of
it makes the mind boggle and I guess each individual can’t describe how
they feel.”

Green’s feelings hint at an even more elemental human response to the
Earth’s shared sky. “When we’re outside thinking about loved ones passed
away, we look up and think how big the universe is and how small we really
are.”

*Shared Sky* *is at John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth from
October 1 to November 2.*
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