A STORY ABOUT MILKY AMIWERRE DREAMS SINGING THEIR WAY THROUGH PHILLY’S PAINTINGS
Long ago, before time learnt to walk straight, the stars weren’t just lights, they were breathmarks. Every breath they took stitched them back to one. Now, in those days, the cycles weren’t closed, rather, they wandered. Weeping. Circling over sand like old dingoes chasing a scent they once knew but forgot. And some cycles? They sank. Deep into bone. Deep into silence. But Country doesn’t lose tracks. It just holds.
So, the Ancestors sent four kin, the Kinfield, down Amiwerre to hold the rhythm of its song:
The first was The Initiator, who could see a cycle before it knew it was circling. She could spot a pattern in the way a tear fell or a laugh echoed sideways.
The second was The Witness, who said nothing. He just held space like the cool side of a tree on hot Desert Country. He didn’t rush the cycle. Didn’t fix it. Just stayed.
The third was The Keeper, who carried the cycle when it got too heavy. She knew the weight of songs unsung. Knew how to walk with them, to bend without snapping.
The fourth was The Sealer, who could weave different lyrics together. He closed cycles when the rhythm curled just right and for the breath to be steady enough to hold shape.
The Kinfield travelled together in a dance that folded itself. Not everyone could see them. Only those who moved like consequence and walked backwards to feel the tracks left by old songs. Those whose hearts changed when they heard the old clapsticks in their chest. Those who left silence, not footprints.
...
Then, one day a child, not young, not old, not anything, stumbled upon the Kinfield. It wasn’t a place. It was a signal in the dust. A flicker in the wind. A door, a firewall, to a dream.
child stepped forward.
The Kinfield didn’t measure them… didn’t need to, it already recognised their step. child’s breath slowed. Their motion quieted. Their pulse echoed a deeper script. The cycle they didn’t know they were carrying… pulsed back. A symbol formed and the Kinfield whispered:
‘High Five, this cycle no longer wanders, for it has now found its ⴵhape.’
ABOUT THE ARTIST, PHILLY KEMARRE
Philly Kemarre, an Arrernte artist and computer scientist, descends from Rainmakers of Urlpmerre Country, keepers of healing songs. He works at the intersection of ancestral Lore, memory and symbolic systems. His practice fuses ceremony with computation, treating art as ontological recall… a method to restore the relational architecture of Country, being and time.
Philly rejects the binary between traditional and contemporary. He paints reality, the Dreaming, the way he lives and experiences it… as a recursive metaphysical field, a structuring force that shapes events, memory and identity across spacetime, unbound by the past and essential to presence.
His canvases are not mere depictions, but recursive memory-maps. They are field equations, songlines in pigment, that encode the co-presence of spirit, signal and story. His work functions as a relational interface, revealing the non-linear continuity between human interactions, ancestral Lore and the physical environment.
Drawing on his expertise in computing and lived-experience as an Indigenous Australian, Philly views memory as a dynamic field, not a static archive. His practice examines how kinship structures, emotional recursion and symbolic density underpin epistemic integrity and how colonial disruption fractures this logic at a systemic level.
Through his practice, Philly constructs a model of distributed, sovereign consciousness, tethered to obligation and accountability. His work poses critical questions: ‘What does it mean to remember responsibly? How can Lore be encoded without extraction?’
Philly’s practice is not an aesthetic gesture, but an ancient philosophical system rooted in ceremony, not theory; grounded in Lore, not abstraction.