Listening when others ‘talk back’

Listening when others ‘talk back’

By Kay Lawrence

 

April 2001. Doug Nicholls with ring tree, Swan Hill Museum craft+design enquiry issue 1

 

 

Kay Lawrence is a visual artist working in textiles and former Head of the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. Her work in community tapestry and as designer of the Parliament House Embroidery, installed in the Great Hall of Parliament House in 1988, activated her interest in how communities express their relationship to place through story and art making. A continuing thread in her practice as an artist and writer on contemporary Australian textiles practice has been the ‘unsettling’ legacy of white settlement on Indigenous Australians and their land.

Abstract: This paper addresses the ethics of inter-cultural collaborative art practice from an Australian perspective, through examining aspects of the project, Weaving the Murray. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in her recent book, Reports from a Wild Country; ethics for decolonisation (2005) notes the legacy of white settler society in Australia, claiming that ‘We cannot help knowing that we are here through dispossession and death’ (Rose 2005, p.6). This is a shocking proposition and an uncomfortable position for white Australians. Yet to ignore this reality is to concede to the continuation of a present violence against Indigenous Australians. This is perhaps not now enacted through dispossession and death, but through another type of violence that sets the past aside and ignores the ‘vulnerability of others.’ (Roth 1999, p.5) 

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Abstract from Listening when other 'talk back' by Kay Lawrence

Full paper published in craft + design enquiry; Issue 1, 2009, Migratory Practices

Beyond the seas

Beyond the Seas

By Stephen Dixon

Stephen Dixon studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Ceramics at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1986. His work features in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, the British Council, the Crafts Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Museum of Scotland, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. He is currently employed as Professorial Research Fellow in Contemporary Crafts at MMU Cheshire, investigating the contemporary printed image in ceramics. Specific research interests include the British satirical tradition (in both printmaking and ceramics), commemorative wares and ‘pop’ culture, and the development of socio-political narratives in contemporary ceramics.

Abstract: 

 This paper describes a practice-led research project undertaken in Australia in 2006, in which I sought to explore the relationship between radical changes in cultural/geographical environment and the production of unique forms of material culture. In this case the shift in environment was brought about by migration (enforced or otherwise) from the UK to colonial Australia, and the crafted artefacts of the colonial period (and after) were taken as representative of a particularly Australian material culture. As a maker it was important to me that this research was developed primarily through practice, supported by museum/archive study and fieldwork in Australia. The project therefore proposed a range of historical Australian artefacts as the subject of study, and my own creative practice as the vehicle of study. Read complete paper

 An example of re-located practice, Iron man, (enamelled tin plate). Found and re-worked on location in Adelaide, Australia, March 2006. 

Abstract of Beyond the seas, by Stephen Dixon

Full paper published in craft + design enquiry; Issue 1, 2009 Migratory Practices