Local Colour
Issue 39:1 | March 2019
This issue privileges ideas of local colour as a provocative surface tension, embodying diverse perspectives and materialities. It samples the practices of artists who work with colour and colour values in response to the environment, social life, colour as it comes readymade in a tube, a tin, a colour chart. Reframing or recalibrating the spectrum to more fulsomely embrace multinatural, therapeutic, feminist, queer, Indigenous and other perspectives, it broadly opens up the terms of reference in present-day colour relations.
In this issue
Wardlipari is the homeriver in the Milky Way.
Purlirna kardlarna ngadluku miyurnaku yaintya tikkiarna.
The stars are the fires of people living there. Yurarlu yurakauwi trruku-ana padninthi Wardlipari.
Yurakauwi the rainbow serpent goes into the dark spots in the Milky Way.
Ngaiyirda karralika kawingka tikainga yara kumarninthi.
When the outer world and the sky connect with the water the two become one.
I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.
Oscar Wilde, 1874
As an aesthete Wilde surrounded himself with beautiful objects. This epigram from his Oxford days paid tribute to and satirised the Victorian craze for the exotic. At Oxford University Wilde was introduced to the culture of aesthetes by art critic and philanthropist John Ruskin whose writings on craft also influenced William Morris.
