Mount Kaputar is an ancient volcano in Australia. To picture the landscape, imagine a volcano in the middle of Illinois. It’s surrounded by farmland in the northeastern part of New South Wales. A few hours away from Sydney, hardly anyone ever visits.

Her research was interdisciplinary, focusing on color from an Australian perspective, particularly through the lens of Australia’s indigenous populations. The Aboriginal communities of Australia are the world’s oldest continuous culture, having been self-sufficient for 60,000 to 70,000 years, providing a unique historical and cultural context for her study of color and printmaking.

“When it comes to color, the indigenous cultures in Australia are very earth-based, and it’s closely tied to ochres and what’s in the land. It’s connected to cultural practices, medicine, community, and sacred rituals as well. I wanted to understand that from a much more ancient perspective than what I know here, though it's hard to put into words,” Berman says.

But something new clicked for her after inviting a visiting artist, Althea Murphy-Price, to speak to her class about how she uses color. Despite being a longtime friend of Berman's and familiar with her work, Berman was surprised when Murphy discussed Afrofuturism in her lecture, a topic not mentioned in her artist’s statement or on her website—yet making complete sense in terms of her palette.

In the fall of 2020, during the pandemic teaching period, Laura Berman launched an online blog and archive called Reflections on Color in Printmaking—featuring interviews with over 80 contemporary artists (so far). Through this project, Berman discovered many untold stories about color in contemporary art, sparking her decision to start the blog. Initially hosted on her personal website, the blog quickly gained popularity, inspiring Berman to expand the project in its own website, and, a few years later, pursue a Fulbright Grant to study color from an Australian perspective.

To put it simply, there is a practice in indigenous culture in Australia called “Dreaming”—with a capital “D,” as Berman explains. This community and religious practice involves an individual being assigned or receiving something, usually from nature, to meditate on throughout their life.

“It could be one plant, or even something like thunderstorms—any natural element in the world. The artists in these cultures, who are very prolific, create artwork about these topics that they have studied and immersed themselves in throughout their entire lives. In some ways, it’s a very simple idea,” Berman says, "But it is also a complex and layered process to understand the essentials of just one thing over the course of a lifetime. I have deep respect for this practice."

Color in the work is very complex—often depicting the lifespan of what they’re talking about through a palette. Contrast this with a North American depiction of something like an oak tree—it’s one color in the spring, another in the fall, and another in the winter. Indigenous artwork, however, captures the full span of these colors in one painting, representing more than just a single moment in time.

"I learned that color has a lifespan. There's a reason this green and this red belong to the same plant. Just as there's a reason each leaf belongs to the same plant. It's not just about color, but also imagery, scale, and other elements,” Berman says.