Bundanon’s two exhibits at the centre of the universe

If art is made with intent and power, it can be a container for everything: the universe, time and what comes before and after time. Everything, everywhere and everywhen.

It’s challenging to review two separate and apparently unrelated solo exhibitions on simultaneous display at one gallery. Might it be best to view them separately, two entities cohabiting with no other connection besides proximity? They are, after all, two solo shows. Should they be considered in conversation with each other or even in opposition, or are they two sides of one coin? Perhaps they are “Two households, both alike in dignity”, like the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet.

When reviewing Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s malatja-malatja (those who come after) and David Sequeira’s The Shape of Music, currently on display at Bundanon art museum, I found this question slippery and needed to sit with it for some time.

The two shows are different, with no apparent connection, but something in the depths of my mind told me there was a way of looking at them together.

Antara is a sacred place, a homeland and Indigenous Protected Area in the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands near the middle of the continent, in what you might think of as desert country. To the artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, for whom it is her mother’s Country, it must be the centre of the universe in a spiritual and material sense. Astronomically it’s also the centre of the universe because, speaking in the language of astrophysics, the universe has no centre. If something has no centre then the centre is everywhere. Where you are right now is the centre of the universe: you carry the centre of the universe with you.

Bundanon  is the centre of the universe too, sited on sacred Dharawal and Dhurga lands.

Pumani only paints one subject, her Country Antara, but that Country, that sacred place, contains within it everything in the universe. Like a lot of Aboriginal art, Pumani’s reminds me of the opening lines from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

The world is contained within each of Pumani’s canvases. The red of the land, of blood, of ancestry, connection and people is painted upon the deep blue ground – the land painted upon the night sky, perhaps – and on that red dirt open the star-like white native tobacco flowers, an important medicine plant. Patterns swirl like galaxies, like water, like dust in the breeze. Unbidden, it brings to mind lines from the European Hermetic tradition: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above”, which is often misquoted as the simpler “as above, so below”. Pumani is painting the land, and revealing the universe.

Everything is there, captured and framed on the walls.

This exhibition is not only a retrospective of Pumani’s work,  a powerful display from a culturally strong artist. The collection is multigenerational, including works by her mother, Kunmanara (Milatjari) Pumani, a founder of the arts centre where Betty works, her senior sister Kunmanara (Ngupulya) Pumani, who was on the arts centre board, and a collaborative painting by Betty and her daughter, Marina Pumani Brown. It shows how knowledge and cultural ownership can continue and live on from generation to generation. In fact, intergenerational connection is the only path for culture to take, the only way for culture to survive.

Some of these works are keeping place pieces and others are on loan from collections, and haven’t been shown together before and perhaps never will again. They are joined by an exquisite work commissioned by Bundanon. Retrospectives of living women artists are rare, of living Aboriginal women perhaps more so, and this alone makes this exhibition important.

Sequeira, whose solo show The Shape of Music is in the other main gallery space in Bundanon, is a very different artist. He’s an academic, curator and working artist who explores colour, geometry and sound, bringing the mystical back into the Western art tradition. His Shape of Music is in conversation with abstraction and the infinite, asking questions about form, shape and beauty – interrogating the universe itself.

In the commissioned work Form from the Formless (Under Bundanon Stars) (2025), 30 music stands face each other in a ring in the middle of the room, the focal point between them empty. On each rests a piece of music manuscript paper, upon which the artist has painted a view of the night sky over the site on which they sit. On the facing side of the fold in the paper he has painted, in his signature style, overlapping circles of colour that reflect the palette of the star fields.

Meanwhile, a custom soundtrack curated and commissioned by the artist swells through the space. It’s a song of space, a love letter to the sky. It fills the gallery but is nevertheless minimalist and stripped back. It’s the centre of the universe singing out towards the centre of the universe.

Pumani is painting the land, and revealing the universe. Everything is there, captured and framed on the walls.

Sequeira started this commissioned work with photos of the night sky over Bundanon taken by a friend. He reproduced those photos with reverence, the painted copies smaller than photos. They are precious in a world of cheap reproductions: the act of painting has made them something more. Surrounding this work on three sides are prints of overlapping coloured circles, demonstrating how colours blend and become new with each layer. The fourth wall has a shelf of glass beaker-shaped vases of various sizes and colours, mixing the light and throwing the result onto the wall behind them.

A third artist is in conversation with Sequeira: Arthur Boyd, who donated the site of Bundanon to the Australian people to be a gallery and art centre. In the corridor to Sequeira’s installation along one long wall is displayed A Sacred Conversation (2007),  in which the abstracted geometry of the intersecting haloes of St Francis of Assisi and St Louis of Toulouse in a 19th-century painting are explored in a series of coloured panels. Across the hall are the St Francis of Assisi paintings by Boyd that contrast and converse with this work.

This is a clear and obvious conversation: first between Sequeira and the vintage panel but also between those two artists.

Another partner in the conversation between these three artists is Bundanon itself. There’s a site-specific angle to Sequeira’s work, the act of commissioning the night sky over the gallery.

In the end it is impossible not to examine those exhibitions in conversation with each other. They contain everything between them: the Earth, the sky and outwards to the universe. They converse with each other as you move through the space; they converse with each other as they converse with the universe and with time, space, land, spirit and meaning to the infinite and back to the dirt. We visit the world of the fractal, where diving deeper opens out more detail, where the edges are infinite although they exist in finite space. 

Claire G. Coleman travelled with the assistance of Bundanon.

Betty Kuntiwa Pumani: malatja-malatja (those who come after) and David Sequeira: The Shape of Music are showing at Bundanon, New South Wales, until October 5.

ARTS DIARY

CINEMA Melbourne International Film Festival

Cinemas throughout Naarm/Melbourne, August 7-24

CULTURE Darwin Festival

Venues throughout Larrakia Country, August 7-24

VISUAL ART Threshold: Robyn Harman + Jill Crawford

Sidespace Gallery, nipaluna/Hobart, until August 10

SCULPTURE Ricky Swallow, Bent Forms #1-#4

Museum of Contemporary Art, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until July 20, 2026

LITERATURE Byron Bay Writers Festival

Venues throughout Budjalung Country/Byron Bay, August 8-10

LAST CHANCE

THEATRE Trophy Boys

Carriageworks, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until August 3

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
August 2, 2025 as “All at once”.

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