What are dot paintings?

Dot paintings are a contemporary style of Aboriginal art characterised by patterns of small painted dots applied with sticks, brushes, or fingers to canvas, board, or other surfaces. The style emerged in 1971 at the Western Desert community of Papunya, north-west of Alice Springs, and has since become one of the most recognisable forms of contemporary Indigenous art in the world.

The technique developed when senior Pintupi, Luritja, Anmatyerre, and Warlpiri men began transferring traditional ceremonial designs from sand drawings, body paint, and ground constructions onto portable surfaces using acrylic paint. The school art teacher Geoffrey Bardon encouraged the work, and the artists formed the Papunya Tula Artists company in 1972 as the first Aboriginal-owned art co-operative. The dots were partly chosen to obscure secret-sacred elements of the underlying designs from uninitiated viewers, while still preserving the deeper narrative.

Dot paintings carry meaning at multiple levels. The physical dots and lines represent country: rock holes, soakages, mountains, sandhills, ceremonial sites, and the paths walked by ancestral beings during the Tjukurpa. To a viewer who shares the knowledge, the painting is a map and a story all at once. To outside viewers, the work is read primarily as abstract pattern and colour. Both readings are valid, and many artists carefully manage which elements are shown at all.

Major dot painters include Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, whose 1977 work 'Warlugulong' sold at auction in 2007 for 2.4 million dollars; Emily Kame Kngwarreye, an Anmatyerre woman from Utopia in the Northern Territory whose late-career work entered international collections; and contemporary artists working in centres at Papunya, Yuendumu, Kintore, Lajamanu, and across the Western Desert. Most dot paintings sold today carry certificates of authenticity from the artist's home community and the relevant art centre.