19.10.21 | Press

Songlines Review – an epic pioneering show of Aboriginal art & culture

The Times, 22 October 21

First Night Exhibition, Rachel Campbell-Johnson

FOUR STARS

A pavilion has been erected in the square outside The Box in Plymouth. Go in and lie down on its floor. Gaze dreamily upwards into the bright images – wandering lines and spotted patterns, clumps of colour and gathered dots – that drift slowly across the domed ceiling. Let your imagination slip gently into their mysterious world.

This is the world of the Australia’s Aboriginal people. These images are the repositories of ancient First Nations stories. They embody message that remain relevant today.

Fifty millennia ago, the earliest Aboriginal ancestors carved designs much like these into the fabric of the landscapes on which their lives depended. Though them, they told the creation stories of their civilisation. They plotted the ‘songlines’ of an ancient lore which, tracing the journeys of ancestral spirits, were passed down through the generations, conveying wisdom, knowledge and culture, without which their people would not continue.

The show that now opens at The Box – Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters – leads visitors along one of these songlines: a pathway that traces the story of the Seven Sisters, the mythical spirits that Aboriginal people see when they gaze up at the star cluster also known as Pleiades.

Fleeing the attention of Yurla, a priapic old sorcerer (he is found in the nearby constellation that we know as Orion), the sisters undertake an epic journey. It carries them across three deserts, through the changing territories and languages of three different indigenous groups.

Read the full article here