Its origins and place in art history:

Dot art or dot painting is now recognised the world over as a unique and original Australian Aboriginal art style.

Before Indigenous Australian art was ever put onto canvas the Aboriginal people would smooth over the soil to draw sacred designs which belonged to that particular ceremony.

Dot painting originated 40 years ago back in 1971. Geoffrey Bardon was assigned as an art teacher for the children of the Aboriginal people in Papunya, near Alice Springs.

When Australian Aboriginal artists first began painting spiritual canvases in the 1970s, they were concerned that by painting their images on canvas rather than in the sand, as they had done for centuries, outsiders would gain understanding of their secret rituals. So they invented a unique aesthetic language based on dots, which they use in their paintings to hide their sacred imagery.

Artists of note that have used dots in their work include:

French artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1886, this became known as Pointillism.

Damien Hirst is famous for his spot paintings.

Bringing the polkadot to the world of comic-book art, Roy Lichtenstein managed to make dozens of little dots look just as vibrant as swathes of paint.

John Baldessari (1931 – 2020) is known for photographing his subjects and then painting a dot over their faces. Simple, but effective.

Yayoi Kusama is a dot icon. Everything she touches turns into hundreds of tiny balls, with the artist covering everything from pumpkins to infinity rooms into polka dots

These few examples go to show just how diverse the dot art method can be, how free-style the process can be and how gratifying the end result will be.

Where does Taff Rocks fit?

Taff Rocks are increasing our repertoire to include other creative methods to produce art that will enable our beneficiaries to explore their creativity, create where they thought there was no creativity to be found and, even if an understanding of the power of the creative process escapes you, experiencing it is key to what we want for our communities.