Across the sandstone shelters of Kakadu and Arnhem Land, Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia made the soot-black hand stencil — a hand pressed to the rock while charcoal or ochre was blown from the mouth around it. The marks accumulated over tens of thousands of years, layered and overpainted on weathered, soot-stained overhangs.

This system reads those marks at their true in-shelter darkness — not the sunlit ochre of tourist photographs. The ground is dark weathered sandstone; figures sit on the stone with sprayed, sooty edges, in a documented palette of charcoal, weathered brown, stone gray, ochre-tan, haematite red, and pipe-clay white.