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This piece is a very large coil built platter/bowl using a red terracotta mid fire clay. It was acquired into the Gold Coast City Art Gallery Ceramics Collection as part of the 30th Gold Coast International Ceramics Art Award 2016.
It depicts the Pleiades or Seven Sisters clustered in a circle with a snow flaky, frosty white centre in the morning light of early sunrise.
A morning bowl.
The Pleiades women first appear in the Southern Hemisphere in the early hours of the morning, and they flamboyantly sweep across the sky excreting frost.
When you are out camping in the bush in Australia, you know that the Pleiades women have visited your camp overnight when you wake up with an extremely cold nose and the canvas of your swag covered in white icy crystals. (D. Johnson, 2011, p292)
There are widespread similarities in beliefs about the Pleiades within Australia between Aboriginal groups and also between Aboriginal and European cultures. The image of the Seven Sisters travelling together across a landscape, fleeing the unwanted advances of a man, is an archetypal motif firmly lodged in many cultures. In Australia they are indicators of seasonal calendars among other things.
Stories of the Seven Sisters traverse thousands of kilometers of country as several separate narratives. Hundreds of narratives feature in great song cycles that are still maintained and performed regularly, particularly in the Central and Western Deserts.
Other stories extend this song cycle into QLD, into the mouth of the Murray River in S.A, in many places around NSW including the North Coast, the Blue Mountains, the Western Plains and the marginal Desert country.
The Seven Sisters story spans thousands of years, linking sites and people across the continent. (D. Johnson, 2011, p294)
The Pleiades represent a unity of common purpose, shared knowledge and respect and recognition for all things physical and metaphysical. They are a recognition of shared and universal ancestry.
References
Johnson, D. 2011, Interpretations of the Pleiades in Australian Aboriginal astronomies, Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, UTS, Sydney, pp. 291-297