"Our Tjukurrpa - our dreamings - bring us all together from the western desert: Luritja, Arrente, Pintupi, Warlpiri, Ngaanyatjarra, everyone. The dreamings intersect and form a whole. You can't understand one story without the others, or one tribe or group without the others. In paintings like this one, which refer to these connection, the colours coincide with elements of ritual. When all the groups come together for a great ceremonial event, it's a reunion, a time for remembering what's changed, and for remembering the members of our families whom we've lost: we join together and share the events of our lies as one. Let me tell you something about the colours: they are similar to the colours we wear on our bodies in these ceremonial encounters. The yellow sand stands in for the Kantawara ochre: the red, we call Karrhu: the white one is Pintarrapa, and it has a special meaning for us. When we meet each other in ceremonies we share our sorrow by wearing precisely this white paint: the yellow colour also announces that we've lost a very dear person, a brother, maybe, or a child.
In this way the various ochre colours are signs that bring us together. We might only see each other in such an extended group once every two years: that's the way of things. In bringing our sadness together, we pay our respects to each other for our sorrows and our losses, and then we're free to move forward in our lives. And so we join together to recall and re-emphasise our traditional stories and at the same time, through those stories, we give air to our loss and grief, and those feelings find their fitting place."