 Colour as the edge of the body Colours as space-time in the east of the Western Desert Diana Young Why colour? What does colour do? What do Anangu (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara) people living in the Western Desert of Central Australia on the Anangu (Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands or APY Lands) conceive that it does? In this chapter I explore these questions through the interrelations of colours to space and locale and the idea of colour as a new material in relation to one artist’s painting. I situate that painting’s place in a local art history of colour. The painting, called Minyma Kutjara/ Two Women, is by Kunmanara ( Amanyi Dora Nyuwara) Haggie (Okai) henceforth ‘Dora’ 1 . I discuss one woman’s placement of herself, emotionally, physically and spatially through the palette of red, yellow, green, blue and black. This group of colours is divided into ‘chords’ (red/yellow and blue/ green) to effect both a transformative movement and a contraction and expansion of space. In an insightful paper drawing on the work of Lefebvre, Munn (1996) discusses the basic duality of space for Western Desert people with relevance to areas or locales that are forbidden to individuals. There is firstly the corporeal-sensual field of a person that extends outwards at a 1 The living must change their name when someone with the same name dies because it makes the relatives of the dead person too sorry to hear. Thus an individual may have a sequence of names in a lifetime or simply revert to being ‘kunmanara’. When someone dies their own name becomes replaced with the word ‘kunmanara’ in Pitjantjatara. There are similar replacement words for names in other Western Desert languages. Rematerializing Colour : From Concept to Substance, edited by Diana Young, Sean Kingston Publishing, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=6194580. Created from uql on 2022-04-28 07:17:42. Copyright © 2018. Sean Kingston Publishing. All rights reserved.