The Living Archive of Aboriginal Art: Maree Clarke and the Circulation of Photographs as Culture-Making

In the summer of 2019 (February-March), a group of graduate student volunteers from the University of Melbourne participated in a series of art-making workshops in the backyard of the southeast Australian Aboriginal artist Maree Clarke. These workshops coincided with their work to register the photographic collection of Ms Clarke's—a collection that arose from her cadetship in photography during the 1990s. The photographs consist of images of the Aboriginal community throughout Victoria during this period. The students' engagement with the photographs, alongside their work in collaborating with and learning from Maree and her family to make a series of art-works—a river reed necklace, a kangaroo tooth necklace and a possum-skin cloak—positioned the photographs in relation to Maree's ongoing contribution to culture-making through art-making, processes that are central to enhancing understandings of the interconnection of everything in relation to the Living Archive