Raiki Wara


Book Description

This important exhibition celebrates the use of an introduced medium, which has encouraged a daring break with tradition in contemporary Aboriginal and Toores Strait Islander art. In focussing on painted and printed textiles and on the last three decades, Raiki Wara draws attention to the contribution of indigenous artists throughout Australia who have made this new medium their own.




Across the Desert


Book Description

This superbly illustrated volume celebrates the early development of Australian Aboriginal women¿s art through the evolution of batik production in five central desert communities Ernabella, Fregon, Utopia, Yuendumu and Kintore. Originating in Indonesia, batik is a wax-resist process used to create patterned fabric. It first emerged as a dynamic new form of Aboriginal art during the 1970s and 1980s, and has since gone on to become one of the most instantly recognizable forms of Aboriginal art. Across the Desert features many exceptional and pioneering works including designs created by leading artists Nyukana Baker, Emily Kam Kngwarray, and Ada Bird Petyarr, who all began their careers in the medium.




Aboriginal Religions in Australia


Book Description

Over the last 25 years there has been an explosion of interest in the Aboriginal religions of Australia and this anthology provides a variety of recent writings, by a wide range of scholars. Australian Aboriginal Religions are probably the oldest extant religious systems. Over some 50,000 years they have coped with change and re-invented themselves in an astonishingly creative way. The Dreaming, the mythical time when the Ancestor Spirits shaped the territories of the Aborigines and laid down a moral and ritual law for their occupants, is the fundamental religious reality. It is the basis of the Aborigines's view of their land or country, kinship relationships, ritual and art. However, the Dreaming is not a static principle since it is interpreted in different ways, as in the extraordinary movement in contemporary indigenous painting, and in attempts at an accommodation with Christianity. The contributions of anthropologists, cultural historians, philosophers of religion and others are included in this anthology which not only guides readers through the literature but also ensures this still largely inaccessible material is available to a wider range of readers and non-specialist students and academics.




Drawn from the Ground


Book Description

Provides a multimodal analysis of women's sand stories from Central Australia, showing how speech, sign, gesture and drawing work together.




"Don't Ask for Stories--"


Book Description

This collection of histories, in both written and illustrative form, tells the story from atomic bomb tests in 1950 to commercial success in the 1990s. The beautiful batiks from Ernabella are exhibited throughout the world and the artists are sought after as teachers in Australia and internationally.




Feminist Perspectives on Art


Book Description

When the body is foregrounded in artwork – as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work – so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art. The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory–practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women’s embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of ‘how the body feels’, how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one’s curatorial method. This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.




Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985


Book Description

Transnational Perspecives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 is a collection of essential essays that bring transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The artistic practices and processes examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The book’s central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, visual culture, material culture, and gender studies.




The C Word


Book Description

An account of the different ways the diagnosis of ovarian cancer affected two lesbians who were partners and active members of the lesbian community in Melbourne in the 1990s. The book covers the events of the last two and a half years of Maureen O'Connor's life, from initial surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and other treatment.




Indigenous Archives


Book Description

The archive is a source of power. It takes control of the past, deciding which voices will be heard and which won't, how they will be heard and for what purposes. Indigenous archivists were at work well before the European Enlightenment arrived and began its own archiving. Sometimes at odds, other times not, these two ways of ordering the world have each learned from, and engaged with, the other. Colonialism has been a struggle over archives and its processes as much as anything else.The eighteen essays by twenty authors investigate different aspects of this struggle in Australia, from traditional Indigenous archives and their developments in recent times to the deconstruction of European archives by contemporary artists as acts of cultural empowerment. It also examines the use of archives developed for other reasons, such as the use of rainfall records to interpret early Papunya paintings. Indigenous Archives is the first overview of archival research in the production and understanding of Indigenous culture. Wide-ranging in its scope, it reveals the lively state of research into Indigenous histories and culture in Australia.




Contemporary Art and Feminism


Book Description

This important new book examines contemporary art while foregrounding the key role feminism has played in enabling current modes of artmaking, spectatorship and theoretical discourse. Contemporary Art and Feminism carefully outlines the links between feminist theory and practice of the past four decades of contemporary art and offers a radical re-reading of the contemporary movement. Rather than focus on filling in the gaps of accepted histories by ‘adding’ the ‘missing’ female, queer, First Nations and women artists of colour, the authors seek to revise broader understandings of contemporary practice by providing case studies contextualised in a robust art historical and theoretical basis. Readers are encouraged to see where art ideas come from and evaluate past and present art strategies. What strategies, materials or tropes are less relevant in today’s networked, event-driven art economies? What strategies and themes should we keep hold of, or develop in new ways? This is a significant and innovative intervention that is ideal for students in courses on contemporary art within fine arts, visual studies, history of art, gender studies and queer studies.