ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to provide approaches to exploring beauty from a relational position. Beauty is addressed through its generative potential; through perception, skill, and bodily and performative capacities; and through its spatio-temporal qualities. The book explores the affective potential of patterning as a form of direct translation, as a synthesis of mnemonics and spatio-temporal meanings, linking land with kinship groups. It shows that beauty is a shared experience, manifest through movement, as infants and care-givers elicit communication and response, and give "graceful attention to the world", in contrapuntal forms of conversation, evoking a musicality through both their playful and performative qualities. The book develops the relationship between beauty, time and things, showing how meetings between First Nations people and their material heritage in museums can prompt co-existing experiences of beauty, which may undercut standard museum views.
