Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art As Experience

Breasts, Bodies, Canvas reinterprets Central Desert art. These paintings are not just aesthetically pleasing, they evoke crucial bodily sensations and sensibilities. Anthropologist Jennifer Loureide Biddle focuses on what this art 'does' rather than what it 'means'. Breaking a generation of scholarship that has identified these works as traditional symbolic representations of country, Biddle opens up a new path for understanding these works as material forces of culture, sentiment and politics. The encounter with Aboriginal art is understood to be a sensuous engagement with cultural difference as a lived reality.
This book examines the rise of female Aboriginal artists, and the tactile and sensory activities involved in painting. Biddle argues that the recent success of women painters points to a certain 'feminisation' of country, Ancestor and Dreaming that makes this art literally enlivened and enlivening.