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• The Arrow Looks Like the Wrong Totem for This Country. Restricted with Jacob Jungarrayi Spencer. 2014-2018
• The Arrow Looks Like the Wrong Totem for This Country. Restricted with Jacob Jungarrayi Spencer. 2014-2018
• The Arrow Looks Like the Wrong Totem for This Country. Restricted with Jacob Jungarrayi Spencer. 2014-2018
• Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024

‘This is my grandfather’s Jukurrpa. My grandfather use to sit down at that lake and sing the country alive, songs that his father had taught him. These are the songs that were sung as the lake was created. It is the Jukurrpa of the snake creating the lake. The ancestral warna (snake) is an important totem to Warlpiri people.

‘In one of the photographs, we decided to paint the direction that the snake dreaming journeyed through the country with a series of arrows in the direction it travels. I then realised that my arrows looked like the emu track totem and so I made Patrick paint over it. We can’t paint another person’s Jukurrpa or the designs for another person’s country.’ – Jacob Jungarrai Spencer

In the process of making this artwork Waterhouse found this moment with Jacob Jungarrai Spencer telling: ‘When thinking about an arrow going in one direction representing an emu foot that’s going in another, this seemed like a good analogy – what to a Western eye is pointing in one direction may mean the opposite from an Aboriginal perspective.’