Creating art to 'save the world' (Kerry)

A group of teenagers is seated around a low table on which are displayed various artworks and brochures from Uluru and Kakadu. They finger the boldly etched wooden carving and study the map of Australia curiously. Some are sketching designs from the brochures and prints in front of them. There is an excited buzz in the room.

These are students from a secondary school in Palo Alto, California. They are undertaking a project with their art teacher in collaboration with the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, rangers from Uluru and Kakadu National Parks, authorities from their local Olhone Indigenous communities and four artists from Victoria, Yorta Yorta women, Treahna Hamm and Lee Darroch, and Kirrae/Gunditjmara women, Vicki and Debra Couzens (Palo Alto, 2007).

Their goal is to create works that encourage their communities to take care of the environment. They are referring to design elements from Australian Indigenous artworks as aids to creating their own symbolic language for environmental awareness. They are taught that the symbols used in the Indigenous works are significant in describing country, cultural practices and community relationships. Over the following weeks, two of the groups within the class complete their project using rabbit and possum skins from which they create two cloaks. The cloaks are decorated on the inside (away from the fur) with symbols and patterns of significance to the students in urging others to be environmentally aware.

The four Victorian artists consulted for the Palo Alto High School project have been responsible for reviving the art of making possum skin cloaks in Victoria over the last ten years. Treahna Hamm and Lee Darroch began by creating an Echuca possum skin cloak after seeing a Maidens Punt (Echuca) cloak and a Lake Condah cloak in the Melbourne Museum in 1999. They then proceeded to teach other Victorian Indigenous communities the necessary skills to make their own cloaks. The cloaks of 35 of the 37 Indigenous language groups in Victoria were worn at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. Subsequently a series of glass possum cloak panels designed and constructed by Hamm, Darroch and a third Yorta Yorta artist, Maree Clarke, has been installed in the new Oxfam Building in Carlton, Melbourne.

These two art projects using possum skins raise some pertinent issues about the role of art in imagining sustainable futures. The artists are creating the art collaboratively and in the process forming a strong sense of community. As well, the collaboration serves to unite “diverse skills, experiences and interests” (Carter, p. 9) and has the potential to materialise a new inventive understanding of the community’s shared culture. Paul Carter uses the metaphor of weaving to explain his idea of the collaborative process. He proposes that the warp threads extending lengthwise in the loom represent the “culture’s myth lines, the grand narratives in terms of which it defines its sense of place and identity” (Carter, p. 11). However he suggests that the warp-thread narratives cannot gain cohesion “unless the shuttle of local invention is at work, casting its woof-thread back and forth” (Carter, p. 11). The term 'local invention' refers to the art-making process itself and Carter sees it as being “a structure for reinventing human relations” (Carter, p. 10). Thus we have the idea that a collaborative art-making process can be the means for inventing and strengthening a community’s culture and its stories.

In each of these projects, in Victoria and in Palo Alto, the artists were explicitly involved in creating sustainable futures. For the students in Palo Alto, it was important to be using natural materials, materials that could be seen as recyclable. Their focus was also to proclaim the message of environmental awareness and to remind their community of its responsibility, both as individuals and as a community as a whole, of the need to take care of the environment. In Victoria, the Indigenous artists are also involved in imagining a sustainable future, but this time in terms of sustaining their cultural heritage, by telling their community’s stories and reviving past skills and traditions. They have already inspired other Indigenous communities to reconnect with their past traditions and stories by creating possum skin cloaks using their own signs and symbols. Carter regards this process of collaboration, and creative research, as “the always unfinished process of making and remaking ourselves through our symbolic forms” (Carter, p. 13). He sees it as an “imaginative breakthrough, which announces locally different forms of sociability, environmental interactivity and collective storytelling” (Carter, p. 13).


References:
Carter, Paul. Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004.

"Patterns of Culture: Cultural Identity and Environmental Practices Illustrated in Design Symbols." Palo Alto, California: Palo Alto High School, 2007.