Patjarr, home to the Kayili artists, is a small community situated 1000 kilometres west of Alice Springs, in the heartland of the Western Desert. The first white people the Kayili saw arrived by car; now the desert is populated with cars — some functional, many in stages of decay. For the Kayili, the car is a vital part of desert life. Many secondhand vehicles come to the desert, often bought with the money the artists earn from painting. Eventually, the tough desert conditions render the cars beyond repair, and they are abandoned.

Preserved by the dry climate, these five bonnets lay in sand for years before the Kayili artists repurposed them for paintings of their ancestral dreaming tracks. There is a beautiful symmetry in seeing these wrecks returned to the cities they came from after being revived with paint and culture in the desert. Here, artists Mary Gibson, Mrs Kumana Ward, Pulpurru Davies, Nola Campbell and Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles have each indulged a love of colour, animating their bonnet’s surface with shimmering, cryptic, topographical maps of their country, and the ancestral journeys that formed it.

Feature image: Kayili car bonnets on display along GOMA's Pavilion Walk, August 2020 / Photograph: C Callistemon, QAGOMA