Origins Centre’s hands-on ochre workshops bring ancient art to life

6 May 2019 -

Whenever we feel the need to unleash our inner artist, it’s all too easy to flip open a tub or tube of paint and start daubing away. But how did early humans make their paint tens of thousands of years ago, and where did they find the materials?

The Origins Centre’s ochre workshops offer budding Picassos, Pierneefs and Sekotos of all ages a fun way of finding out!

The museum runs regular ochre workshops with Origins Centre Curator, Dr Tammy Hodgskiss, whose academic speciality (and personal passion) is archaeology, ochre and rock art.

During a recent workshop, she showed a packed room of participants ranging from tiny tots to more mature art enthusiasts how to get their hands dirty and have a whale of time grinding, pummelling and mixing their own natural pigment and then painting their own prehistoric masterpieces.

Dr Hodgskiss explained that evidence suggests that our ancestors started making coloured paint 100 000 years ago, right here in South Africa during the Middle Stone Age. The oldest known paint-making “studio” was discovered in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast, where archaeologists found abalone shells, bones and stones that they believe once served as a “toolkit” to make paint. They also found what is reportedly the world’s oldest recorded art there – an ochre rock engraved with an abstract geometric pattern dating back 75 000 years.

She outlined how these early hunter-gatherers used rocks containing ochre – a soft clay pigment containing iron oxide that often gives off a reddish colour when ground into powder – and mixed in animal fat and charcoal to make a compound mixture that may have been used as paint or glue. “Ochre also has a lot of uses other than paint – it may also have been used to tan hides, as it stops the decay process,” Dr Hodgskiss said.

During the informative, engaging and highly interactive workshop, kids and their parents had a ball grinding ochre in the same way their ancient forebears had, blending powdered charcoal into the red-brown mix and engraving designs on rocks with a small stone tool.

They also learned how indigenous communities such as Namibia’s Himba have traditionally mixed ochre-rich kaolinite clay with water to use as a sunscreen.

Namibia is host to Southern Africa’s oldest dated rock paintings, created by San hunter-gatherers in the Apollo 11 cave (located in the south-west of the country) some 27 000 years ago. The San, whose art was closely linked to their spiritual rituals, would often mix pigments with egg albumin or animal fat – or even the blood of animals such as eland, for its reputed potency properties, Dr Hodgskiss said.

The group of would-be artists and paint technologists had a marvellously messy and creative time – learning about the origins of art while having heaps of fun! Teachers, art students or parents who would like to know more about the Origins Centre’s workshops and seminars can contact Dr Tammy Hodgskiss at +27 (0)11 717 4707 or email tammy.hodgskiss@wits.ac.za.