#australianart

APY Lands Art: The Living Story of the Seven Sisters

Across the vast deserts of South Australia, the APY Lands have become home to one of the most dynamic and internationally celebrated movements in contemporary Aboriginal art. Rich in colour, cultural authority, and spiritual depth, APY paintings often draw upon the great ancestral narratives of the Western Desert, especially the epic Seven Sisters Dreaming that stretches across Australia through an immense network of songlines.

Artists from communities such as Amata, Ernabella, Fregon, Indulkana, and Mimili transform ancient cultural knowledge into powerful contemporary works filled with sweeping landscapes, sacred sites, ancestral journeys, and vibrant fields of colour. Their paintings are not simply images of the desert but expressions of Country itself—recording relationships between people, place, ceremony, and law that have endured for countless generations.

Stelarc Exoskeleton Exoskeleton A six-legged, pneumatically powered walking machine has been constructed for the body.

The locomotor, with either ripple or tripod gait, moves fowards, backwards, sideways and turns on the spot.

It can also squat and lift by splaying or contracting its legs. The body is positioned on a turn-table, enabling it to rotate about its axis. It has an exoskeleton on its upper body and arms.

The left arm is an extended arm with pneumatic manipulator having 11 degrees-of- freedom. It is human-like in form but with additional functions.

The fingers open and close , becoming multiple grippers. There is individual flexion of the fingers, with thumb and wrist rotation. The body actuates the walking machine by moving its arms.

Different gestures make different motions- a translation of limb to leg motions. The body's arms guide the choreography of the locomotor's movements and thus compose the cacophony of pneumatic and mechanical and sensor modulated sounds....