The following artwork was sourced from Christ in the Desert.
This website is no longer online, so unfortunately I can no longer refer you to the original writers and artists. But I hope you find the creativity of our Koori brothers and sisters as inspiring as I have:
"What has come to be known as Aboriginal art was originally characterized by distinctive graphic elements grounded in the religious rites and tribal ceremonies of a nomadic people. It was primarily represented by the sacred drawings and ritualistic designs left behind by hunters and gatherers in the caves. These mysterious images evoked stories and legends about the ancient "hero" characters of the "dreamtime" who walked the lands when the world was created."
"These [Aboriginal Christian] works incorporate traditional Western iconography connected with the Crucifixion, including spears, whips, and the crown of thorns. However, the paintings also include stylized footprints, occasionally used in other Aboriginal works, and crescent-shaped forms, which designate people sitting. These elements lead the eye through the story of Christ's Passion and death in a very natural and uncomplicated way."
"In these and other works that depict scriptural events, such as Palm Sunday and Pentecost, artists tell stories in simple pictorial language that would be clear to Aborigines in that it is drawn from everyday experience."
Pentecost and teaching scenes
Communion scene
Nativity scenes
Easter scene depicting last supper and crucifixion
As the spiritual art of an originally nomadic people, the emphasis in Aboriginal icons is quite different from Western art. The most noticable distinction is the emphasis on footprints and tracks in the shifting sands. Aboriginal art was functional, it spoke to tribes of their journeys across the storied landscape and of the landmarks to look for on the way. I am wondering if we digital nomads can lean from them...
5 comments:
Those are really outstanding pictures. Do you know when they were made?
I am seeing if I can recover more of the original site information from my hard drive or dead links on the web. I think one of the artists was named Matthew Gill - still living I think. The final picture is actually a banner from an outback mission church, Catholic I think, but can't rightly recall. Unfortunately aboriginal communities aren't overly networked. Can you work out the symbolism?
Definitely. Anthropology is my passion, and I love to see works of art from indigineous groups. They're incredibly beautiful.
Matt - thanks for posting this. I'm currently researching for a paper on iconography in which I argue that iconography is a further incarnation. By wrapping the eternal text in the flesh of time and place (in the specificity of face and gesture, context and symbol), the glory of God is reavealed to every people in every generation. Anyway - thanks.
Stacey
Glad you found it of value. Have you seen the rest of my icons at http://mattstone.blogs.com?
For what its worth, IMHO the iconic scenes I’ve gathered are of more value than the iconic portraits when it comes to incarnating the word.
Why? Well the scenes always bring you back to the stories. Irrespective of how culturally idiosyncratic the figures in the scenes are depicted, you can always say ‘Ahh! This one, despite its alien appearance, is actually telling us the surprising story of the woman at the well,” and do so without being an expert.
The portraits, on the other hand, can very easily degenerate into exercises of artists recreating God in their own image. This is most clearly evident with my collection of esoteric icons. Some artists have taken classic depictions of Jesus and romantically imported all sorts of Gnostic, Pagan and New Age concepts into them. What did Jesus and Mary and the Apostles really look like? Well, we don’t know. So facial features alone don’t make them authentically Christian! Not by themselves anyway. What is more important than the facial features is the subtle symbology – the colours, the hand gestures, etc, which express the understandings of the artists – and when you change those symbolic cues to express non-Christian concepts, well what you’re looking at is no longer a Christian icon even if it superficially looks like a familiar Jesus image.
In this respect my favourite artist in the collection is He Qi. His icons are a riot of colourful scenes. They always deeply reflect his culture, lending them an exotic appeal to cosmopolitan westerners like me, yet always draw me unmistakably back to the essential stories of the faith. And for those astute enough to pick up on it, there is Christian symbology woven through them which further serves the stories. This embodiment of the evangelion is what makes an icon actually incarnational.
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