Notes on Indigenious knowledge and art.

The dreaming

• Artworks have a deeper meaning with aboriginal myths and beliefs
• Central to belief system is “the dreaming”
• Replicated through paintings with various symbols and dot infillings
• Through paintings, non-aboriginals can gain a understanding of aboriginal culture and beliefs
• Aboriginal artist Richard Bell suggests that “the dreamtime is the past, present and the future”

Video: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/kids/people-places-kids/australia-rockart-kids/

Burrup Peninsula

• Aboriginal art created over 50 000 years old can be found as rock carvings in various areas around Australia
• ‘creates the most extensive use of rock  carvings to be found anywhere in the world” (Anderson, 2009)
• A million of these carvings can be found in the Pilbara region. They document spiritual and everyday lives of the indigenous people
• Artworks include carvings of individuals, animals, designs depicting creatures that have been extinct for about 3000 years

Papuya Tulla

• Artist corporative formed in 1972
• Schoolteacher and filmmaker, Bardon was interested in indigenous design.
• He encouraged his students to make use of the designs he had seen them draw on the sand
• He made attempts to involve his students in painting murals on the classroom walls
• Carter states that he provoked the “first public affirmation of aboriginal identity in the western desert” through the Honey ant mural, 10 x 3 metre wall painting
• Most famous artist of this movement was .

Albert namatijra

• Most well known aboriginal artist
• Watercolour outback Australian desert landscapes
• Artworks famous for their brilliant, bright colours.
• They revealed his love and connection to the land
• Charles Perkins states that “namatijira” was definitely the beginning of a recognition of aboriginal people by the white Australia”
• One of the first artworks, central Australian landscape (1936) shows a land of rolling green hills
• He used the approach of western painters in his artwork “red bluff” 1938, landscape illustrated through contrasting colours – red hills and green trees

References  

• Bell, R. (2002) Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art: It’s A White Thing, Koori Web (http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html, accessed 21/1/2010).

• Anderson, P. (2009) The world's oldest palimpsest, Australian Art Review Aug - Oct 2009(20): 26-27.

• Cartar, P. (2009) Dark Writing, geography, performance, design, University of Hawai`I Press, United States of America

• Perkins, H. and H. Fink (2000). The corporeality of landscape, Art and Australia 38, No 1(spring): 74-82.

• National Geographic, 1996 – 2012, National Geographic Society, viewed 21/05/2012,