Vicki Cullinan: The Sky Sees

Cullinan’s sublime paintings depict munga ilkari, the southern night sky that represents an omniscient force in remote communities. “The sky is the largest presence watching these lands” she states. “It holds all our ancestral stories from a long time ago. It watches every day what happens in our community: the chaos, the beauty, the hard times, the laughter. The sky sees and knows everything. It holds all this energy and reflects back on us at night, it is forever and it is still.”

Her canvases are built up with layers of luminous paint, swirling whorls of earth colours streaked with spattering dot work evocative of stars. “When I’m paint- ing, I try to tap into the calm energy of the night sky … my painting process is meditative, there’s no planned outcome. I’m usually working on a few at the same time, building up layers of colour and different mark-making, balancing dark and light, calm and energetic.” Cullinan has compared her sky paintings to landscapes, and indeed they could equally read as the shimmering patternation of wind-swept desert grasses, evoking the beauty of her Country both by day and by night.

In line with Iwantja’s multi-artform approach, Cullinan occasionally experiments with other mediums, including “…different printmaking techniques, drawing, and ceramics”, she says. This has recently expanded to include filmmaking via The Iwantja Women’s Film Project, which builds upon the success of Never Stop Riding, a mock Spaghetti Western created by a number of Iwantja’s male artists paying tribute to their shared backgrounds as cattle drovers. “The community was so proud of this project and it got so many young fellas involved in our Art Centre,” says Cullinan. “The senior artists got their grandsons involved and the young men really felt a sense of ownership and were so proud to see themselves up on the screen”.