VISUAL NARRATIVE IN FOLK ART

Later we can follow the way that story telling in folk art continues using this idea of parallel bands of images to show how events follow one after the other, rather like we find in a comic strip, or in a film sequence in modern cinematography. The icon which captures the moment in time, becomes a dramatic sequence of scenes when each icon is placed in relation to other images that give it a context in space and time. We might wonder how each pictograph, or larger iconic representation, relates to the surrounding richly carved surface of the rock, to create a document that spans over many layers of time.

PRIMAL PATTERNS

Triangular and zig zag patterns are an essential feature of all tribal art, to be seen in the designs on artifacts like baskets, or vessels.


We also find these patterns in woven materials, where the structure of vertical and horizontal strands in the warp and woof of threads, are used to create diagonal forms. It is interesting to find that it is these patterns that constitute the visual language that we find in the way bands or borders of the rock art, surround and frame important iconic images of human figures, who are also constructed out of intersecting and criss crossing lines, that echo the fissures that we find in the very fabric of the rock surface.

THE STRATA OF THE ROCK FORMATION

The slanting lines of the strata, gives a structure to the way in which the cave art presents us with a visual narrative. The images seem to follow the lines created by the stratification of what appears to be a sandstone where natural fissures indicate the way in which layers have been formed in the mountain structure. Here perhaps we are also witnessing the beginning of a narrative process which like writing, follows a linear pattern along pre-determined bands that will in due course of time represent the way in which a story also follows a cursive process, one image following on another in a connected flow of symbols that indicate a development through time as well as space.

WRITING ON THE WALL

The wall space of the Edakkal caves provides a vast canvas on which both images and words have intermingled. Here the images are themselves the source for a narrative that words also articulate. Some of the epigraphic material that has been deciphered on the rock surface has been etched in at a date later than the earlier pictographs. But the earliest inscriptions seem to indicate that this space had a cultic significance, related perhaps to a tiger spirit, which could have been linked to a Mother goddess. Certainly there are indications of very early animal forms, which might have also been associated with hero hunters as we find represented in later hero stones.

IMAGE AS TEXT

In the pictographs of Edakkal we can see the way that the visual sign both leads towards representation, and towards the use of markings that are the beginning of writing. In this way the image becomes a document, which gives us a rare insight into the world of vary ancient peoples.

THE WATER CARRIER

Recently a scholar who has been studying the pictographs that we find in Monenjodaro and Harappan civilization, has noted the similarity between a figure who appears to be carrying a large pot, to a similar pictograph in the Edakkal caves. It is a common metaphor of the body to relate it to an earthen pot, and this may have suggested itself to people who had begun making vessels out of clay, using the potter's wheel

THE WHEEL

The human form seems to evolve out of very fundamental pictographs. As with the early drawings that we observe in child art, the circle which can be related to a wheel with spokes, becomes associated with the face, and from this extends the various limbs, like rays of energy that go beyond the enclosed space which in one place looks like a spiral, but which in other representations have an almost seed like structure, of intersecting arcs, from which lines emerge with an explosive force.