ngargee – Coming together to celebrate
Southeast Australian Aboriginal Art
Aboriginal art practice in southeast Australia is dynamic, innovative and powerful. This is clear from the diverse artworks in this book which celebrate contemporary Aboriginal artists and their continuation of Ancestral knowledge. The artworks shown are accompanied by commentary and analysis unpacking complex issues related to First Nations art-making and culture-making.
A guiding theme is the creative practice of internationally renowned artist Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/ Wamba Wamba/ Yorta Yorta/ Boonwurrung). Maree’s talent for collaborations and passion for reclaiming and reviving arts practices over almost forty years has seen her recognised as a leading southeast Australian artist, with invitations to work in France, Italy, Japan, Cuba, UK, Canada and the USA.
ngargee is a collection of intercultural partnerships that prioritise learning with and about First Nations artists to support Indigenous knowledge systems. These engagements take us from possum skin cloak-making in modern-day Melbourne, to 19th century German paintings, to sharing the knowledge and art of feather flower-making revivified in Maree’s backyard. Each chapter showcases southeast Australian contemporary Aboriginal creatives with international and Australian co-producers.
ngargee presents a model of intercultural collaboration led by Aboriginal artists and knowledge holders. Southeast Australian Aboriginal art here receives the attention and celebration it so richly deserves. This vibrant and multivocal collection is an indispensable resource for all Australian museums and galleries, and anyone who wants to learn more about contemporary First Nations art.
ngargee means coming together to celebrate in Boonwurrung language, where celebrations are accompanied and demonstrated through the act of making art. Just as art and culture cannot be separated, neither can celebration and art-making.
Frances Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar working mainly in the field of anthropology. Her work is collaborative, participatory and community based. Her research interests include art and wellbeing; decolonising methodologies; the creative use of digital technologies; visual studies; oral history and storytelling; cultural revitalisation and the archival and ethnographic record; and the intersection between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. She was the senior research fellow on the Australian Research Council (ARC) Indigenous Discovery Project, ‘Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge’ (2020-24). Between 2014 and 2017, she worked closely with First Nations young people at Korin Gamadji Institute, Melbourne, supporting collaborative research throughout the ARC Linkage project ‘Aboriginal Young People and Digital Storytelling’.
Sabra Thorner is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Indigenous Australians for more than twenty years, focusing on photography, digital technologies and archiving as forms of cultural activism. In the past few years, her work has increasingly turned towards collaborative and decolonising methodologies in both research/writing and in teaching/learning. She is especially interested in contemporary arts and cultural production, matriarchal forms of knowledge transmission, and storytelling as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty. She’s held fellowships from AIATSIS, Fulbright, Mellon, the Smithsonian and Wenner-Gren, and has published her work in Museum Anthropology, AnthroVision, The Journal of Material Culture, Oceania and Visual Anthropology Review. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung) is an artist and curator who grew up in Mildura (northwest Victoria), on the banks of the Murray River, and who has been living and working in Melbourne for over 30 years. She has become a pivotal figure in the revitalisation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices. This includes possum skin cloaks, kangaroo teeth necklaces, eel traps, kopi mourning caps and much more – in both traditional materials and contemporary, such as glass and 3D printing. Her practice includes lenticular prints, 3D photographs and photographic holograms, as well as painting, sculpture and video installation. The through line of her work is to facilitate intercultural dialogue and collaboration about the ongoing effects of colonisation, while simultaneously providing space for Aboriginal people and communities to engage with and mourn the impact of dispossession and loss. She is deeply committed to transmitting knowledge to younger generations (and anyone else who is willing to learn). Clarke has exhibited her work widely in Australia and beyond, and her work is held by the Koorie Heritage Trust, Museums Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. In 2021, her work was featured in a major retrospective, Ancestral Memories, at the National Gallery of Victoria.
