Dot Games

THE PLAYERS

Traveling in Australia, I spent a few days in Darwin. That was my jumping off point for a dusty road trip east to Kakadu National Park, the heart of Aboriginal culture.  I viewed Aboriginal art in contemporary galleries in town and in ancient rock and cave paintings at Kakadu.  Both the ancient and the modern work incorporate dots, circles and various other geometric shapes.  I was told that Aboriginal artists paint with the intention of mapping the geophysical environment concretely as viewed through the Aboriginal cosmology.  But to the Western mind the objects in Aboriginal cartography don’t relate to physical reality; actual locations of places and landmarks in relationship to each other seem to be irrelevant.  Frequently dreams are used for inspiration. Geometric shapes and their relationships in the paintings are symbolic.  For example, dots and circles reference water.  The various shapes relate to rocks, hills, trees, ponds, etc. but they are spatially organized in a way that is undecipherable to the western concept of mapping. 

Cosmological information is guarded, withheld even from the tribe in the memory of the elders. They parse it out to tribal members depending on individual merit. The most accomplished members of the group are ceremonially given increasing amounts of knowledge. Certain knowledge is specific to women or to men. All of this unwritten knowledge is sacred and it is secret.  Non-aboriginals will never learn it.  

Consequently, my experiments with dots and geometric shapes might only accidentally capture any Aboriginal meaning.  These paintings are merely experiments in abstraction with no concrete references whatsoever. The Quartets all contain the same design elements but differ in color.  The trios all use the same colors but differ in design.