Australian Aboriginal art

This paper uses statistical analyses to examine the hypothesis that the creators of the Gummingurru Stone Arrangement Site Complex, southeast Queensland, deliberately selected rocks, based on size and shape, for the production of motifs at the site. As Gummingurru is an Aboriginal site, the literature that frames the research concerns Aboriginal cultural Law and worldviews. However, because the data are archaeological measurements, quantitative statistical methods are also employed. These quantitative results demonstrate deliberate selection of rocks occurred in the construction of four of the motifs at Gummingurru. We conclude that there are archaeological signatures of human behaviour in response to the requirements of cultural Laws with respect to the choice of raw materials, at least in stone arrangement sites.

ABSTRACTThis article discusses changing obligations toward objects from an archaeological site held by the Queensland Museum, through a long-term, 40-year case study. Between 1971 and 1972 a selection of 92 stone blocks weighing up to 5 tons containing Aboriginal engravings were cut out of the site and distributed to multiple locations across Queensland by the State Government under the provisions of the then Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act 1967. The site was subsequently flooded following dam construction and the removed blocks became part of the Queensland Museum’s collection. This article chronicles the history of the site and its “salvage,” the consequences of fragmentation of the site for community and institutions, the creation of 92 museum objects, the transformation from immobile to mobile cultural heritage, and community-led requests for their repatriation back to country.

Stone arrangements are frequently encountered on the Australian mainland and islands. They have high significance values to Indigenous Australians and are usually associated with the material expression and emplacement of socio-religious beliefs and associated ceremonial/ritual activities. Despite their ubiquity, stone arrangements are an understudied site type with their distribution and morphological variability remaining poorly documented and their functional variability poorly understood. Although in most parts of Australia the authorship of stone arrangements is unambiguously Aboriginal, for far north Queensland this singularity is less clear for places where Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, and more recently South Sea Islanders, all with documented traditions of stone arrangement construction and use, are known to have operated. A comparative stylistic analysis of stone arrangements constructed by Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders, and Island Melanesians of the southwest Pacific reveals that although Lizard Island Group stone arrangements are predominately of Aboriginal authorship, some arrangements exhibit cultural influences from neighbouring areas. In this respect, Lizard Island Group stone arrangements appear to be a further material expression of the Torres Strait Cultural Complex and Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere.

Wyman is a Palawa woman who was born in Sydney and raised in North Queensland (Dysart, Moranbah, Tolga and Mackay). Her own visual sense of identification and what would emerge in the public sphere as a question of both indigeneity and authenticity, were perplexing, challenging, and unresolved growing up—a matter further complicated by living in a diasporic context. Attending the Queensland University of Technology, Wyman’s initial desire to pursue painting was met with defiance. In the early noughts, art schools were navigating the politics of post-modernity and modernist disambiguation.  The jargon around the open studio practice of environmental art and transdisciplinary new media was used to discourage female painters from pursuing what was perceived as decorative, leaving the ‘history painting’ to the men.  Wyman eventually resurrected the act of painting through her own distinct language. Using a Turkey baster—the mythologised phallus perceived to be a tool for individually performed female insemination, was used by the artist to create drip paintings on canvas. Claiming this instrument was as an act of queering.

Public Programme Overview The Tala o le tau public programme built on the exhibition's core themes of exploring Pasifika responses to the climate crisis through an emphasis on indigenous knowledge systems and creative practice. The exhibition's artworks prompted a wide range of events that targeted different audience demographics including Pasifika communities, students and families. The public programme was conceived by Gus Fisher Gallery's Public Programmes & Engagement Officer and comprised of six scheduled events, including a six-week workshop series, artist and curator talks, workshops for Tamariki, film screenings and an interdisciplinary Talanoa. Additionally, a total of 14 tours was delivered to external and tertiary groups from a range of disciplines. A cornerstone of the exhibition's offer to audiences was the practical and participatory workshop series Weaving the Weather, supported by the Auckland Council Creative Communities Scheme. Facilitated by Tāmaki-based artists Dahlina (Ina) Taueu with support from Mary Adeosun, these workshops took inspiration from Tala o le tau: Stories from the Weather created by Yuki Kihara and the Moata'a Aualuma Community. Over the course of Image: Artist talk with Angela Tiatia and Yuki Kihara, 7 June 2025.

It is tempting to follow a well worn path and draw up a simple formula that makes apparently natural connections between colour, geography and identity, especially in Australia. Such a formula is fashioned from a series of analogies that act as boosters for specific mythologies about Australia as a country, nation, culture or even design industry. Following the tourist public relations brochures, and the colours of Australian national sporting teams, you could wax lyrically about the golden yellow of the Wattle flowers or that dark bottle green that is symbolic of what?—Eucalyptus trees maybe. Note here the attribution of names for interior design colours found in charts for various paint companies. (see Fig. 1) An analysis of the history of colour chart nomenclature provides a fertile ground for reading a culture through the different names for colours. The names such as Drover's Swag, Walkabout, or Billabong's Edge, given to the paint samples in the Wattyl colour system,...

This chapter examines the history of the concepts of religion, art, and ritual. In some places, these concepts are so familiar that they have become invisible. Yet however obvious they seem, this framework developed at a particular time, in a particular place. As we understand them today, art and religion emerged in early modern Europe in parallel with a new institution, that of the secular state. It is no accident that the link between art and religion is a source of unease: they were created to be incompatible. By retracing the path that brought us here, the author argues that we needn’t be bound by our predecessors’ anxieties, for these concepts are ripe for reinvention.

This paper explores telepathy as a tool and method of collaboration within international visual art practice since the 1960s. The words telepathy and telethesia were coined simultaneously when Frederic Myers founded theSociety for Psychical Research in London in 1882. However, telepathy names an experience of distant (tele) feeling (pathos) or ideas (thesia) found in all cultures. Telepathy and collaboration are tools that a number of artists reach for simultaneously when attempting to share and/or transformsubjectivity. This raises questions of the overlapping imilarity between telepathy and collaboration, and of what it means to collaborate using telepathy. What is shared between telepathy and collaboration, and what is different?

Tāmaki Makaurau’s Gus Fisher Gallery and Gow Langsford are
proud to present a new body of work by renowned artst Yuki Kihara.

In her latest series Tala o le tau: Stories from the weather (2025), Kihara has worked collaboratively with the Moata’a Aualuma Community of Upolu Island, Sāmoa, in the creation of vibrantly coloured fala su’i (embroidered mats). Each mat, woven from pandanus fibre and bright woollen thread,
renders the infrared satellite imagery of tropical cyclones which have impacted the Sāmoan archipelago over the past two decades.

Once you look into the forest and not just at it there's tucker everywhere. 1 In July 1988, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) screened something quite new in Australian television. Starting with a montage of a man in a khaki shirt, blue green trousers, boots and a hat that was cleft in the middle, picking leaves off bushes, tearing open a mollusc, improvising a bush washing machine with a flour drum and jam tin, leaping from one rock to the other, scrambling up solitary crags, driving a khaki four wheel drive, all in bush settings. He was Les Hiddins and the show was the Bush Tucker Man. Hiddins was a soldier in the Army aviation section. 'I found myself in the left-hand seat of a helicopter flying all around northern Australia and Arnhem Land … When you go to these very remote areas, you've got to ask yourself the question, 'how would I get on if something happened and I had to survive here?' So, I started doing it as a hobby.' 2 His 'hobby' was noticed by the Army and in 1987 Hiddins was awarded a Defence Fellowship to James Cook University to study northern Australian ethno-botany. The Department of Defence, particularly the Army, have got an interest in this sort of thing, because if we have soldiers out here in the paddock they need to know (how to survive) …It's my job to catalogue and analyse all the bush tucker resources around these areas and there's an awful lot that we don't know about. 3

This essay attempts a survey of the Australian artists who worked in the world’s art colonies from the late nineteenth century until the present. It also looks at the art colonies in Australia that brought together Australian artists and artists from overseas..

Dit hoofdstuk onderzoekt de afnemende tendens van zelfreflectief vermogen in de
hedendaagse, snel veranderende en sterk gedigitaliseerde samenleving. Met name gericht op de jongvolwassen academicus anno 2025, analyseert het onderzoek de oorzaken van deze erosie, waaronder de constante informatiestroom, de invloed van sociale media, een dominante oplossingsgerichte mentaliteit, de vermijding van negatieve emoties en bepaalde opvoedingsstijlen. De gevolgen, zoals toenemende moeilijkheden in interpersoonlijke relaties, belemmeringen voor persoonlijke groei en verhoogde stressniveaus, worden eveneens belicht. Centraal in dit onderzoek staan de kernconcepten van Erwin J.A. Sengers – kennis, houding, vaardigheid, dialoog en ordening (canvassing) – die als een robuust theoretisch kader dienen om het belang van zelfreflectie te duiden en te revitaliseren. Het hoofdstuk argumenteert dat een herwaardering en actieve cultivering van zelfreflectie cruciaal zijn voor het ontwikkelen van handelingsbekwaamheid in een complexe wereld. Er worden concrete handelingsperspectieven aangedragen voor het individu, het onderwijs en de bredere maatschappij, met als doel lethargie en zelfgenoegzaamheid te bestrijden en een diepere verbinding met zichzelf en anderen te faciliteren. Dit onderzoek beoogt niet slechts te filosoferen, maar praktische handvatten te bieden die de lezer ondersteunen in het navigeren door de uitdagingen van een geïndividualiseerde samenleving en het versterken van hun ‘ability to act’. De aanbevelingen zijn geworteld in de intentie om een coherente en krachtige bijdrage te leveren aan de overkoepelende thematiek van de "Handelingsmatrix"

Western and Indigenous sciences. They derive from the `Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Traditions' conference, held at the Cairns campus of James Cook University in August 1996. ... The confer-ence was an ambitious venture, sponsored by the Humanities Research ...

In 2017 the New South Wales National Parks & Wildlife Service engaged Ray Christison of High Ground Consulting to obtain a more complete understanding of the story of human occupation of the Ukerbarley Aboriginal Area.

It became obvious quite early in this study that the significance of Ukerbarley lies in its importance as both a complex of occupation, ceremonial and learning sites, and its regional connections. The first community meeting with Elders and community members clearly identified traditional connections with Burra Bee Dee Mission, and Ray Christison’s conversations with the late Uncle Bill Robinson had previously linked Ukerbarley with the Nandi Hill Bora Ground.

The Tiwi Islands, comprising Bathurst and Melville Islands, hold profound significance in Aboriginal mythology, with their origins attributed to the ancestral creator Mudungkala. As described in Tiwi creation stories, Mudungkala, a blind elderly woman, emerged during the Dreamtime (Palaneri) and shaped the islands by traversing the barren landscape with her three children. Her journey, marked by the creation of waterways such as the Clarence and Dundas Straits and the Apsley Strait, introduced vital resources like fresh water, vegetation, and animals, ensuring the land's capacity to sustain life. This narrative intriguingly aligns with geological evidence of rising sea levels following the last Ice Age, approximately 8,200 to 9,650 years ago-a period coinciding with global flood myths, such as those of Mesopotamia and Greece, as well as the speculated submergence of Atlantis.

This article  presents a discussion between two Australian First Nation creatives working closely with collections at public art institutions in Sydney, Australia. Juanita Kelly-Mundine is a West Bundjalung and Yuin Woman and First Nations Collections Coordinator at the National Museum of Australia (former Aboriginal and Torress Strait Islander Art Conservator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Tammi Gissell is a
Muruwari and Wiradjuri Woman and Collections Coordinator, First Nations at The Powerhouse Museum (PHM). Together, they reflect upon the nature of institutional memory, highlighting the significance of performance-based critical encounters with collections amid current political, social and sector sentiments of truth-telling. They discuss growing strides
toward safeguarding Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property (ICIP) rights across the broader arts and culture sector and how this also informs intangible cultural heritages that are simultaneously embodied and shared.
Juanita and Tammi also reflect on the production and presentation of performance works in public gallery spaces and navigating the accountabilities of contemporary arts practice, institutional employment and Indigeneity, which must always be in service of Country, community and culture.

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between the examination of Old Norse engravings of signs and symbols and the analysis of Australian Indigenous iconography. Individuals aspiring to become artists in the non-Indigenous context typically pursue education at art schools, where art history is a significant subject. Emerging artists study classic Greek art, its impact on Roman art, the Romanesque and Gothic periods, the pinnacle of Western art, the Renaissance. The rules established during the Renaissance, particularly the central perspective, persisted as foundational elements in subsequent styles, including Baroque, Rococo, and Classicism. Prior to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century, naturalistic representations dominated the creation of paintings and sculptures. Pre-Mediaeval and Early-Mediaeval Norse engravings illustrate narratives in a manner akin to comic books, as can be seen at the stone of Ramsund in Norway. Sand paintings, produced by Central Australian Aboriginal people, may seem abstract to those unfamiliar with them; however, these artworks, organised through circles and lines, convey narratives to individuals who have been trained to interpret them. Subtle distinctions, such as the arrangement of three concentric circles versus two or the spatial positioning of symbols, whether in proximity or distance, also communicate significant differences. Participants in ceremonies typically possess an understanding of the event's overarching theme and have acquired, or are in the process of acquiring, specific details of the narrative. Understanding Aboriginal art, utilising traditional painting techniques, enhances the non-Indigenous artist's comprehension of Northern European pre-mediaeval art, establishing connections to contemporary abstract art, while at the same time creating a link to Northern and Central European heritage. The Party of Life Invitation by Keith Haring (1986) is an outstanding example of resemblance to the engravings on the stone of Ramsund.

Within the early phases of Gariwerd rock art, a particular motif has, since the earliest studies, caught the attention of rock art researchers. This figure is what we now call, in respect of Aboriginal tradition, the Marmie (father figure). Here, we present a detailed description of the Marmie and its distribution and a case for its high significance to its painters and today's Traditional Owner groups.

Aboriginal art in southeast Australia is dynamic, innovative and
powerful. The diverse artworks featured in this book celebrate
contemporary artists and their continuation of Ancestral knowledge.
With each chapter the result of an intercultural collaboration,
this volume speaks to globally resonant themes in First Nations
art, storytelling, and sovereignty. Each contribution prioritises learning
with and about First Nations artists to support Indigenous knowledge
systems.
A guiding theme is the creative practice of internationally renowned
artist Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wamba Wamba/Yorta Yorta/
Boonwurrung), who is both an editor, co-author and an inspiration.
Bringing together thoughtful analysis and lush illustrations, ngargee,
meaning coming together in Boonwurrung language, gives southeast
Australian Aboriginal art the long overdue attention that it richly
deserves. ngargee will be a welcome addition for anyone who wants
to learn more about southeast Australia, the richness of
its art practices, and the continuity and innovation of First Nations
knowledge-transmission and culture-making across time and place.

This essay will trace my conceptual stumbling amidst a succession of ephemeral frameworks of contact—from informal conversations to complex exhibitions—oriented through blindness. Via creative experiments, and myopic reading of William Forsythe’s choreographic objects theory, a trio of methods coalesced to texture and tension the temporalities, densities, dynamics, and choreopolitics of performative works: blundering, be-holding, and wayfinding. Blindness is not treated as darkness or nocturnalism here, but instead introduces a complexity and diversity of embodiments and relationships to perception, imagination, and consciousness, that offer an array of alternatives to the ocular standard of 20:20  vision. Blindness may destabilise performer-spectator conventions, activate attentiveness and movement improvisations, and innovate methods for sensing, archiving and conserving performative artworks. This essay will trace a few of these fledgling propositions, as I nudge blindness away f...

In the tradition of narrative podcasts exposing historical injustices, The Greatest Menace (TGM) examines how a government-run prison in Australia used those imprisoned to study the causes and treatments of homosexuality. Hosted by gay Arab-Australian journalist Patrick Abboud, TGM interweaves Abboud’s struggle for acceptance in his homophobic community with his forensic documentation of lives ruined by a society where homosexuality was illegal till 1984. Gay men entrust Abboud with their experiences of aversion therapy and estrangement from family; a former cop reveals how he entrapped, then arrested, gay men; a trans woman runs away to New Zealand after being imprisoned. TGM charts the palpable intimacy between Abboud and most of his informants, but as this article explores, the podcast also held potential for the privileging of activism over ethics. The cop could have been depicted as evil, but in pursuit of fairness, the TGM team settled on a more nuanced portrayal. An evangelical interviewee conflates “homosexual” with “paedophile” to Abboud’s face; he retaliates by recording his meta-fury and writing it into the script. Intimacy and trust are intertwined as Abboud and his mother navigate the shame and fear that shadowed his coming out. Using textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, iterative scripts, reflexive practice, and theory of audio storytelling and podcast intimacy, this article analyses, from an autoethnographic insider/maker perspective, how the producers of this acclaimed podcast (17 awards) balanced intimacy and trust while exposing historic queer true crime in all its messy humanity.

The Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) was established in March 1990 under an agreement between the Australian National University and the Commonwealth of Australia (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission). In accordance with the Agreement, ...

Darley, Rebecca, and Daniel Reynolds, ‘Exhibiting Coins as Economic Artefacts. Curating Historical Interpretation in Faith and Fortune: Visualizing the Divine on Byzantine and Early Islamic Coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013-January 2015)’, Journal of Art Historiography, 13, 2015, pp. 1–23

This article explores the possibility for displaying and interpreting coins in exhibition contexts as historical, rather than artistic, artefacts, and the possibilities for making an object type often seen as obscure or challenging, engaging and relatable. It explores examples drawn from the Late Antique meeting of Christianity and Islam and from medieval Mesopotamia.

Darley, Rebecca, and Daniel Reynolds, ‘Exhibiting Coins as Economic Artefacts. Curating Historical Interpretation in Faith and Fortune: Visualizing the Divine on Byzantine and Early Islamic Coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013-January 2015)’, Journal of Art Historiography, 13, 2015, pp. 1–23

Key aspects of the Gwion rock art tradition are threefold: the historic origin of Wunan law as evidence of a society started by an artist; methods of the art tradition recorded on film and its enduring role as graphic legal documents within a cultural network under Wunan law; and its future as a meaningful legacy of fine art under Ngarinyin munnumburra conservation and research management within their native title region according to native title and customary law. * Images of Ngarinyin persons and ancestral sites are reproduced in this paper; persons of Aboriginal descent may decide not to view the contents of this publication. 1 Ngarinyin is the largest and central language group of the plateau region of the northwest Kimberley, Australia (Horton 1996). Their neighbours, the Worrora and the Wunambal-Gaambera, share the same Wanjina-Wungurr Law (Wunan).

Increasingly planning practice and research are having to engage with Indigenous communities in Australia to empower and position their knowledge in planning strategies and arguments. But also to act as articulators of their cultural knowledge, landscape aspirations and responsibilities and the need to ensure that they are directly consulted in projects that impact upon their 'country' generally and specifically. This need has changed rapidly over the last 25 years because of land title claim legal precedents, state and Commonwealth legislative changes, and policy shifts to address reconciliation and the consequences of the fore-going precedents and enactments. While planning instruments and their policies have shifted, as well as research grant expectations and obligations, many of these Western protocols do not recognise and sympathetically deal with the cultural and practical realities of Indigenous community management dynamics, consultation practices and procedures, and cultural events much of which are placing considerable strain upon communities who do not have the human and financial resources to manage, respond, co-operate and inform in the same manner expected of non-Indigenous communities in Australia. This paper reviews several planning formal research, contract research and educational engagements and case studies between the authors and various Indigenous communities, and highlights key issues, myths and flaws in the way Western planning and research expectations are imposed upon Indigenous communities that often thwart the quality and uncertainty of planning outcomes for which the clients, research agencies, and government entities were seeking to create.

This book is a portrait of the period when modern art became contemporary
art. It explores how and why writers and artists in Australia argued over the
idea of a distinctively Australian modern and then postmodern art from 1962,
the date of publication of a foundational book, Australian Painting 1788–
1960, up to 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentennial.
Across nine chapters about art, exhibitions, curators and critics, this
book describes the shift from modern art to contemporary art through the
successive attempts to define a place in the world for Australian art. But by
1988, Australian art looked less and less like a viable tradition inside which
to interpret ‘our’ art. Instead, vast gaps appeared, since mostly male and
often older White writers had limited their horizons to White Australia alone.
National stories by White men, like borders, had less and less explanatory value. Underneath this, a perplexing subject remained: the absence of Aboriginal art in understanding what Australian art was during the period that established the idea of a distinctive Australian modern and then contemporary art.

This book reflects on why the embrace of Aboriginal art was so late in art
museums and histories of Australian art, arguing that this was because it was not part of a national story dominated by colonial, then neo‑colonial dependency. It is important reading for all scholars of both global and Australian art, and for curators and artists.

This response critiques Donald Richardson’s essays The Problem of Australian Aboriginal Art and The Continuing Problem of Aboriginal ‘Art’, which frame Aboriginal art as an issue to be resolved within Western/white/European (W/w/E) frameworks. While Richardson attempts to assess Aboriginal visual expression through the lens of Western art history, the real “problems” lie in his Eurocentric assumptions, dismissive terminology, and exclusion of Indigenous perspectives. The essays overlook the cultural, spiritual, and communal significance of Aboriginal art, instead forcing it into narrow Western definitions of “art.” By interrogating the flawed premises in Richardson’s work—particularly his use of quotation marks around the word art and reductive labels such as “primitive” and “naïve”—this critique argues for a decolonised approach to art criticism. Aboriginal art should not be treated as a puzzle to be reconciled with Western paradigms but must be recognised on its own cultural terms, with Indigenous voices leading the conversation. This critique emphasises the need to expand art criticism to accommodate diverse cultural expressions, acknowledging the depth and significance of Aboriginal art beyond Eurocentric aesthetic standards.

The creative power and the economic valorization of Indigenous Australian arts tend to surprise outsiders who come into contact with it. Since the 1970s Australia has seen the development of a system connecting artist cooperatives, support policies and commercial galleries. This article focuses on one particular aspect of this system: the gradual incorporation of Aboriginal objects and knowledge by the country's museums. Based on the available bibliography and my own fieldwork in 2010, I present some concrete examples and discuss the paradox of the omnipresence of Aboriginal art in Australian public space. After all this is a country that as late as the nineteenth century allowed any Aborigine close to a white residence to be shot, and which until the 1970s removed Indigenous children from their families for them to be raised by nuns or adopted by white people. Even today the same public enchanted by the indigenous paintings held in the art galleries of Sydney or Melbourne has little actual contact with people of Indigenous descent.

The rock art of Australia is among the oldest, most complex, and fascinating manifestations of human creativity and imagination in the world. Aboriginal people used art to record their experiences, ceremonies, and knowledge by embedding their understanding of the world in the landscape over many generations. Indeed, rock art serves as the archives and libraries of Australia's Indigenous people. It is, in effect, its repository of memory. This volume explores Indigenous perspectives on rock art. It challenges the limits and assumptions of traditional, academic ways of understanding and knowing the past by showing how history has literally been painted 'on the rocks'. Each chapter features a biography of an artist or family of artists, together with an artwork created by contemporary artist Gabriel Maralngurra. By bringing together history, archaeology, and Indigenous artistic practice, the book offers new insights into the medium of rock art and demonstrates the limits of academic methods and approaches.

This paper uses statistical analyses to examine the hypothesis that the creators of the Gummingurru Stone Arrangement Site Complex, southeast Queensland, deliberately selected rocks, based on size and shape, for the production of motifs at the site. As Gummingurru is an Aboriginal site, the literature that frames the research concerns Aboriginal cultural Law and worldviews. However, because the data are archaeological measurements, quantitative statistical methods are also employed. These quantitative results demonstrate deliberate selection of rocks occurred in the construction of four of the motifs at Gummingurru. We conclude that there are archaeological signatures of human behaviour in response to the requirements of cultural Laws with respect to the choice of raw materials, at least in stone arrangement sites.

The Aboriginal Badmardi artist Nayombolmi (c. 1895-1967) is mostly known for his extensive rock art creations. In this article, we compile and present 17 bark paintings attributed to Nayombolmi. We picture the artist's life and engagement with art collectors and tourists, especially his long-term relationship with Dorothy Bennett and her son Lance. Known artworks created on stone and bark are compared regarding painted subject matters. Our findings reveal that artworks in the stone media are more varied and mainly created for his closest family and kin, while the bark paintings created for the growing art market are found to be more homogenous. It is argued that the artist's audiences and the social context of creating the art had a major impact on what motifs Nayombolmi painted.

When it comes to phenomena like international communication, it is possible to argue that it is as old as human civilization itself. It has existed since humans first organised themselves into communities and began to exchange ideas and products with people all over the world. However, the phenomenon of international communication (IC) as we know it now is primarily a result of technological improvements in recent years, rather than the other way around. Maybe it was the advent of modern transportation technologies such as the steam engine and the internal combustion engine that set off this trend. International communication has strong links to that of human evolution which has shaped the very foundation of the form of communications. Human communication can be viewed through the lens of Berlo's SMCR model of communication. He discusses the model's underlying concerns about human communication, as well as how communication flows at each stage, from sender to receiver, with human variables playing a role. We can find evidence of difference in international communication with changes is the media forms overtime. To investigate the scenario, the researchers are trying to investigate the much lesser known phenomenon of International Communication i.e. the major problems of IC with changing times. The researchers have used the case study method to showcase the problems from literature study of previous research dealing with the problem but textually. This research however, would practically investigate case studies which deal with the problems of international communication in modern times. We have always glorified IC in the pre-text of globalization but this research shall help understand the exact opposite. By doing so the researchers hope to understand and propose solutions to the same, as diagnosing the issues come first.

HE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (NGC) sits on the south bank of the Ottawa River in Ontario. Before Queen Victoria named Ottawa the nation's capital in 1855, this site of confluence was an important trading post. Ottawa derives from the Algonquin adawe: to trade. Established in 1880, the National Gallery of Canada outgrew three buildings before its current glass-andmarble cathedral opened in 1988. This architectural spectacle was designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie. Since 2005 Louise Bourgeois's monumental bronze spider Maman-one of seven in the world-has graced the entrance. Upon entry, visitors encounter one of the building's defining features: a ramp the length of a football field leading to a Great Hall. Several artists have accentuated this long, narrow space for site-specific works, including Shuvinai Ashoona (Inuk) and Joi T. Arcand (Muskeg Lake Cree).

Stone arrangements are frequently encountered on the Australian mainland and islands. They have high significance values to Indigenous Australians and are usually associated with the material expression and emplacement of socio-religious beliefs and associated ceremonial/ritual activities. Despite their ubiquity, stone arrangements are an understudied site type with their distribution and morphological variability remaining poorly documented and their functional variability poorly understood. Although in most parts of Australia the authorship of stone arrangements is unambiguously Aboriginal, for far north Queensland this singularity is less clear for places where Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, and more recently South Sea Islanders, all with documented traditions of stone arrangement construction and use, are known to have operated. A comparative stylistic analysis of stone arrangements constructed by Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders, and Island Melanesians of the southwest Pacific reveals that although Lizard Island Group stone arrangements are predominately of Aboriginal authorship, some arrangements exhibit cultural influences from neighbouring areas. In this respect, Lizard Island Group stone arrangements appear to be a further material expression of the Torres Strait Cultural Complex and Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere.