#IIC Song Lines: Tracking the Seven Sisters and Dots in Art

I travelled to Devon to see this exhibition. It was created in Australia to address concerns that traditional stories and cultures were being lost; stories which are up to 60,000 years-old but that still have relevance today, as part of Australia's cultural heritage and as we reflect upon the relationship between humanity and the earth. The exhibition was designed to engage new audiences and particularly younger Aboriginal people who were in danger of losing connections with their song lines. 

In Plymouth, the exhibition was located in several sites and there was a mix of contemporary paintings, immersive video art and sculpture; most of the artefacts were created by women in community settings or collaboratively with 10 or more artists.

I have a long-held interest in Aboriginal art which was cemented when I lived in Australia and learned more about the landscape and the song-lines traditions. I am interested in the ways stories are told using symbolism in abstracted, cartographic paintings, the use of the dot - thought by some to be a way of masking meanings from western eyes - and in the use of colour and the language of pattern.

The exhibition was certainly inspiring and relevant to my Major Project, particularly the use of colour, marks, pattern and symbolic meanings but also by offering a practical solutions for communicating hidden meanings to audiences as abstract paintings were exhibited with a simple labelled drawing (see images). It was also very helpful to see videos of the work being made and to observe the very relaxed approach to mark-making (which I find so difficult).

The exhibition also made me reflect upon the use of the dot in art and I assumed there must be a book documenting this tradition, but a cursory search has not revealed any key texts unless books about Pointillism have it covered as a topic (I will find out more). Certainly the first dots in art can be seen in cave paintings that are more than 30,000 years old (Chauvet Cave) and then can be observed in art from different cultures and times to the present day: the Bronze Age Nebra Sky Disc (the Pleiades aka the Seven Sisters); Islamic art and calligraphy; Indian mandalas; African painting, textiles and body art; and the western paintings of Seurat, Signac, Lichenstein, Riley, Kusama, Hirst etc. As a basic and fundamental mark - a singularity -  it represents the scale of the maker (or the pixel) and it has the potential to convey meaning as a single mark, in a pair or in a collection to represent different scales: the microscopic and the cosmic. Love the dot!

References:

Wroe, N. (2021 October 25th) Songlines: the Indigenous Australian Exhibition preserving 65,000 years of culture. The Guardian. retrieved 15.02.22

Aboriginal Dreaming retrieved 15.02.22