Songlines - Moustafa Fathi Painting

The songlines are invisible pathways that run across Australia. Every Aboriginal tribe has its own line with its own song; each represents an ancestor of that tribe. A songline can stretch across the desert. They are sung poems that tell the story of an ancestor. When sung aloud, they can guide a tribesman across the desert by following features of the landscape that figure in each story. A dipped hill might be the place where the lizard ancestor sat down, a group of mounds might be where the ancestor ate dingoes and buried them. These are oral maps of the Outback.
The songs figure heavily in much indigenous Australian art. The galleries dedicated to works by artists from the tribes in and around the northern, central and western deserts of the country – the Papunya, the Yuendumu – are often full of works with titles like ‘Honey Ant Dreaming’, ‘Water Dreaming’, ‘Emu Dreaming’. They are each representations of the ancestor stories that feed into the songlines. The works are often complicated, geometrically inspired compositions. Undulating, swirling patterns – infused with movement, they quite often bear the marks of nature in some way: the paths that veins in a leaf might take, the precise rivets found in dust. By Chris Lord

"I derive my inspiration from shapes. Shape has taken a long journey until it took its final configuration. Tools are a form of human thought. They are the trace of the human being. They are human being themselves. I like a tool and it always captures my attention, not because it is a scene, but because it is a living thought. Paintings, on the other hand, are an accumulation of the images and shapes of tools and stones in my head." Moustafa Fathi (1942-2009)