Paper short abstract:

The Aboriginal artist, Maree Clarke's photographic archive is discussed in relation to the interconnections between objects, art-making and stories as a valued process for intercultural knowledge exchange.

Paper long abstract:

Mutti Mutti, Wemba Wemba, BoonWurrung artist, Maree Clarke has for many years been an avid photographer of everyday life as it occurs within the worlds of her family and extended networks. More recently, her collection of photographs, taken in the early 1990s, have become a starting point for a digital 'archive' that seeks to reveal the interconnections between Maree's lived reality as an Aboriginal woman and the processes entwined with her art-making. This art-making process is one of intercultural and intergenerational collaborations and is one that signifies the relationality between objects, artworks, people and stories.

The significance of these photographs, which have been digitally registered by a group of international and local postgraduate students from the University of Melbourne, will be discussed in relation to Maree's art-making and the students encounters with Maree. The circulation of the photographs (initially collected by students from Maree's home), which have now been turned into high-resolution images, were returned to Maree for her most recent art-making endeavours. Students experienced these endeavours during workshops that took place in Maree's backyard in the summer of 2019. The workshops, while focusing on the making of objects, including a possum skin-cloak, river-reed necklaces and a kangaroo-tooth necklace, for a major exhibition in Mildura, Victoria, also revealed how intercultural knowledge exchange, became a distinct form of knowledge sharing about diverse cultures, the process of art-making as central for supporting such exchanges, and revealed the photograph, as object, as part of a Living Archive in relation to the art-making process.