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Accepted Paper:
Recontextualising ethnographic collections: bark painting, rock art, and biography
Sally K. May
(University of Adelaide)
Joakim Goldhahn
(School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia)
Reconnecting and recontextualising museum collections with communities is a vital process in ensuring a future for museums and collections. This paper focuses on the 1912-1922 Oenpelli paintings at Museums Victoria – and addresses the impact of artist identification for community members.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation communicates new research relating to the Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) collection of bark paintings acquired by Baldwin Spencer and Paddy Cahill between 1912 and 1922. As was common at the time, and for decades following, the name of artists was not recorded for the Oenpelli bark paintings and little cultural information was documented. Working in collaboration with local community members, we aim to bring Aboriginal identity, cultural knowledge, and individual artists to the forefront of the collection. Using interdisciplinary research methods, we are looking for evidence beyond the standard archive to recontextualise the collection.