Aboriginal Moon

Artist Statement

The Outback of Australia is vast, beautiful and dangerous. It is also one of the most remote places on Earth. Life is exceedingly difficult and only for the resourceful and the hardy. Indigenous Aboriginal peoples have lived there for 400,000 years and are by choice some of the most isolated people in the world.

What must the Aboriginal people have thought when they learned of the moon landing?

Were they excited or perhaps concerned that a very visual and important part of their world might be changed or harmed?

Were they indifferent?

Were they accepting and celebratory?

For a people living in this remote and harsh place, the challenges of day-to-day life likely dominated their consciousness. I suspect that for the most part, the Aboriginals simply accepted the news and went on with their lives.

Aboriginal people have a cultural tradition of creating art in many forms, most of it simple and graphic. Using a traditional symbol of the moon, an artist might have imagined what his home looked like from high, high above, from the surface of the moon. The result would combine his known world – the land around him – and the spiritual world of his heritage, a celebration of the moon landing and a fitting continuation of 400,000 years of Aboriginal art.

Materials

Commercial cotton and synthetic fabrics, fusing web, fabric paint, cotton/polyester batting