The Eternal Recurrence of Origins
Kingsley Tjungurrayi, Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, 1971

The conversation begins with a discussion of a 1971 painting by Kingsley Tjungurrayi, Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, the earliest in the collection. The subject matter is identified as an ancestral story of rain and lightning, marked by the jagged central figure as an icon of lightning transposed from ceremonial body painting, while small circular figures elsewhere in the painting represent stars. The chapter introduces a puzzle about the use of dots in such a new context, and it traces the artist’s efforts to organize figures within an unfamiliar format while using unfamiliar art materials. It also questions the author’s own imagining of works such as this as being at the “origins” of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement.