Festering boils and screaming canvases: Culture, contagion and why place no longer matters

This paper is a ficto-critical account of the relationship between boils - Staphylococcus aureus - and Central Desert art. It develops an analysis of the ontogenetic relationship between art and disease through the specific aetiology of contemporary manifestations of Staphylococcus. What Warlpiri call Winjini (boils) are found to bear a linguistic and visual relationship with traditional marks, and mark-making, which is more than a simple matter of likeness, metaphor or analogy. Through an account of one ethnographer's narrative of her own, and her family's, contraction of Winjini, a very different understanding of both Staphylococcus, and the productive work of Central Desert art, emerges.