Conference Plenary - Loris Williams Memorial Lecture
| Tuesday, September 5, 2023 |
| 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM |
| AFL Dining Room |
Speaker
Maree Clarke
What is a Living Archive? A conversation.
Abstract Details
In the height of summer 2019, a group of Masters’ students from the University of Melbourne gathered in Maree Clarke’s backyard/ artist studio. Over the course of a month, the students worked alongside Maree and her family learning with and from them to create a series of artworks for a Clarke family exhibition to be held in Maree’s hometown of Mildura. As the students were learning to make a possum skin cloak, river reed necklaces and a kangaroo tooth necklace, they were also involved in digitising Maree’s vast collection of black and white photos taken by her in the early 1990s of southeast Australian Aboriginal people. The photographs included images of NAIDOC marches, community gatherings, weddings, births and everything else in between. For the students, the process of art-making, alongside members of Maree’s family, while simultaneously digitising the black and white photos, revealed the connections between the images from the past to the lives of people in the present and their artwork. This initial foray into making art with students, while working to digitise and record collections so they may be accessible for future generations, presented us with one way of thinking about the potential of a living archive, what it might be and could become. In this presentation, Maree and Fran will hold a conversation about the evolving living archive project – which has travelled between the USA, Newcastle (NSW) and Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land – where linking up stories, artworks, Ancestral collections and more, aims to reclaim the traditional/Western archive by centring Indigenous knowledges in the process.
Biography
Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta/Wemba Wemba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman from northwest Victoria. She is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were disrupted since colonisation. She is renowned for nurturing/promoting the diversity of contemporary southeast Aboriginal artists and is known for her collaborative approach to her multidisciplinary cultural practice – working intergenerationally and interculturally to revive Ancestral knowledge from the ‘archive’. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including: her major survey exhibition Maree Clarke – Ancestral Memories at the National Gallery of Victoria (2021-22); Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2021); The National, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2021); Reversible Destiny, Tokyo Photographic Museum, Tokyo Japan (2021); and Ritual and Ceremony at the Australian Embassy in Paris, France (2022-23). In 2020, she received the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary First Nations Art Prize for the Victorian Artist category; and was awarded the Linewide Commission for the Metro Tunnel project (2020-current). She is the recipient of the 2020 Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fellowship.
Co-Author/s
Frances Edmonds
Dr Fran Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of anthropology and ethnohistory. Her work is collaborative, participatory and community-based, aimed at decolonising research methodologies. Her research interests include the intersection between art, culture and wellbeing; the creative use of digital technologies; youth identity; visual studies; oral history/storytelling; ethnography in the GLAM sector; and intercultural knowledge exchange. For over twenty years, Fran has worked alongside Maree Clarke and other Indigenous matriarchs/artists towards decolonising the archive. She is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne working on the Australian Research Council Indigenous Discovery Project (2001000420) ‘Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge’.
Co-Author/s
Frances Edmonds
Dr Fran Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of anthropology and ethnohistory. Her work is collaborative, participatory and community-based, aimed at decolonising research methodologies. Her research interests include the intersection between art, culture and wellbeing; the creative use of digital technologies; youth identity; visual studies; oral history/storytelling; ethnography in the GLAM sector; and intercultural knowledge exchange. For over twenty years, Fran has worked alongside Maree Clarke and other Indigenous matriarchs/artists towards decolonising the archive. She is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne working on the Australian Research Council Indigenous Discovery Project (2001000420) ‘Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge’.
Moderator
Moderator Staff
