A mysterious fire-lit ritual was performed in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi at least 40 thousand years ago. In this ritual, a human hand was pressed against the cool limestone cave wall to act as a stencil, and a mixture of water and ochre was spat or sprayed over it to create a perfect ghost mark that joined the image of a hand to the boundary of the material world. Recent research has established the minimum age of one of the hand stencils from the cave Leang Timpuseng on Sulawesi as 39.9 thousand years old.[1] The hand was the ‘plate’ or matrix for the first prints, and the hand has continued to be used throughout time to mark individual presence.

 Signet and seal rings worn on the hand sustain this marking of identity. Impressions made by rings similar to the Greek Hellenistic ring (below) have been found on ancient ceramics, left there by the maker as a signature and to invoke the indestructible qualities of Hercules’s skin.[2] The prints made by these rings are tactile embossings, bringing images of the gods within human touch.

Tim Mosley’s art considers the role of touch in our experience of the printed work of art. His production of artists books insists on the touch of the hands, or the engagement of the ‘haptic’.[3] His recent papermaking works continue to call the printed work into contact with the body, by tricking the eye and calling for touch to intervene.

[1] M. Aubert et al., "Pleistocene Cave Art from Sulawesi, Indonesia," Nature 514, no. 7521 (2014). However, the authors add that there is evidence of the same technique being used in Australia, fifty thousand years ago (p. 225).

[2] Ian J. Marshman, "A Roman Tile with an Intaglio Impression from Wallsend," Britannia 45, no. 4 (2014).

[3] Tim Mosely, "The Haptic Touch of Books by Artists" (PhD dissertation, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, 2014).

Gordon Bennett drew inspiration from Yves Klein’s Anthropometry performance series of 1960 for his body prints but his viewing of ancient Aboriginal art sites also played a role in the making of Body Prints, as he noted: “going to Maningrida, and looking at the rock art…sort of stuck with me, seeing the way the works were painted on to the walls and when I moved back to Brisbane, all the ideas came together and it became the right time to actually do some body prints. A lot of my work to date has been working with the idea of the black body - the outside manifestation of the black person and I was a bit worried that people weren’t actually understanding that I was referring to the inscription of the black body with ideas /notions of the primitive and savage etc. But the way they were manifesting in art was through abstraction, so I decided to make it a bit more obvious by using my own body as an imprint- this is more in a figurative way”.[1]

Noela Hjorth stated that her large lithographically produced body prints were also inspired by several trips to Australian Aboriginal rock art sites. After visiting one of the sites, she felt the ochre images were telling her “our bodies may have gone but we have left our physical symbols and our spirits are still here”.[2] Just as the first humans had used their own bodies to imprint their world, so Hjorth’s work recording physical touch is also an attempt to break through the physical realm.

[1] John Tristram and  I. James Wilson, Black Angels: A Widening Vision (Australia: Ronin Films, 1994).

[2] Noela Hjorth, Noela Hjorth: Journey of a Fire Goddess (Roseville, NSW: Craftsman House, 1989), 66.

(Blair Coffey Aug. 2019)

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