Hosted by the NGV, the first major retrospective of Aboriginal designer and artist Maree Clarke explores ideas of Country, culture and place, with over thirty years of Clarke’s work in addition to specially commissioned pieces

Portrait of artist and designer Maree Clarke at the exhibition Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia. Image by Eugene Hyland

Artist and designer Maree Clarke is a seminal figure in the reclamation of south-east Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices, and now three decades of her work is on display at a landmark exhibition at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria in the first major retrospective of her work, titled Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories. A Melbourne-based Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman, Clarke is a prolific artist who began creating jewellery back in the 1980s and has spent her career developing multi-disciplinary art spanning printmaking, photography, sculpture, video and mixed media installations.

At the heart of Clarke’s work is an exploration, reverence and revival of Aboriginal cultural practices and the customary ceremonies, rituals, objects and lost language of her ancestors. The exhibition is hugely significant not only for its vast scope, but also because Clarke is the first living artist to exhibit at the NGV with ancestral ties to the Country on which the gallery stands.

The exhibition spans Clarke’s very first pieces right through to those created in recent years, and showcases her experimentation with historical techniques in contemporary mediums. This includes lenticular light boxes and projected video installations, glass eel traps (traditionally woven from grasses), modern iterations of kopi mourning caps (originally made of gypsum) and oversized 50-metre river reed necklaces, based on talismans given to people passing through Country as a sign of safe passage and friendship, their size representing the scale of loss of land, language and cultural practices. In collaboration with Canberra Glassworks, Clarke has reinterpreted kangaroo teeth in glass and crystal, some partially made with a 3D printer.

One of the highlights is a large 63-pelt possum skin cloak that Clarke produced with fellow Koorie artists. This new version is displayed alongside a very rare original dating back to the 19th century, on loan from Museum Victoria. Based on a tradition that has laid dormant for years, there are very few such cloaks left in the world. ‘There are only 6 historical cloaks left, because you had your cloak for your lifetime, and when you died, you were wrapped in your possum skin cloak for burial,’ Clarke explains. ‘Everyone would have had a possum skin cloak in the south-east of Australia. They were a practical item to keep you warm.’ Engraved with etchings and rubbed with ochre, Clarke says, ‘they told the story of who you were, your connection to Country, culture and place.’

While there are specially commissioned pieces like the possum skin cloak, the NGV’s curator of Indigenous art Myles Russell-Cook says that for an artist with an oeuvre like Clarke’s, it was crucial to show her ‘genesis as an artist working in the darkroom with black and white photography, as well as her early jewellery.’ Most importantly, Russell-Cook says, was that he ‘wanted to show the breadth of materiality, from glass to lenticular, to kangaroo teeth, river reed, film and more. And to make a connection between Maree as a contemporary artist and the historical objects that inspire her work.’

Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories runs from 25 June to 3 October 2021 at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV.

Text / Carli Philips