Australian Aboriginal People Wall Hanging: "Dreaming"

All of aboriginal art in Australia refers to the Dreaming, both the creation of the world and the spirituality of life today. Aboriginal paintings all have an underlying story based on mythological creation stories. The spirit ancestors who embodied the first plants and animals and the natural elements, set the world in motion. When they were done, they turned into rocks and trees, creating the physical landscape of today. Their stories are told in the Dreaming, showing their tracks, their campsites, their battles. Each artist has custodianship of some part of these stories which connect the people to the Australian continent and to each other. Traditionally, aboriginal art was made for purely cultural reasons and was only able to be created or viewed by people initiated to the proper level of knowledge or understanding. More recently, there has emerged work that has been made consciously to be seen by the non-initiated or for commercial purposes. However, irrespective of whether the art is for private ceremonial purposes or is for the public, it remains inspired by the traditional marks and symbols from the Dreaming. The art appears on rocks, bark, wood, sand, human bodies and headdresses. Nearly all Aboriginal art can be related to landscape and some paintings and designs do represent explicitly the physical relationship between different features of the landscape. However, Aboriginal paintings should be seen primarily as maps of conceptual relationships that influence the way the landscape is seen and understood. When Aboriginal paintings do represent specific features of landscape, they show them in their mythical rather than their physical relationship to one another.
Source:
http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/culture/land.php