As part of the 2021 Nurturing Creativity Online Conference, all attendees are automatically included in the 2 x Keynote Presentations which commences each day, as well as participate in additional hands-on workshops included in the ticket price.
This year we are very excited to announce two internationally acclaimed Australian keynote artist speakers:
Yorta Yorta, Wamba Wamba, Mutti Mutti and Boonwurrung artist Maree Clarke
and Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr artist Vernon Ah Kee.
Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the revival of lost or dormant Aboriginal cultural practices. Her artworks integrate traditional and contemporary processes and materials – from Possum Skin Cloaks to Holograms and 3D printing. Maree Clarke’s work explores customary ceremonies, rituals and language of ancestors to discuss ongoing effects of colonisation, and ‘mourn’ the impact of dispossession and loss.
Vernon Ah Kee is a founding member of proppaNOW, the leading Aboriginal Arts Collective in Queensland. His work has been collected, exhibited and acquired both nationally and internationally international museums and galleries. Vernon is a conceptual artist with drawing at his core. He works across Video, photography, sculpture, installation and drawing. Ah Kee fuses the history and language of colonisation with contemporary black/white political issues to expose degrees of underlying racism in ‘Australian society’.
See you there!
Nic Plowman
ZART EDUCATION MANAGER
Day One: Maree Clarke
Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman who grew up in northwest Victoria, mainly in Mildura, on the banks of the Murray River. Maree has been a practicing artist living and working in Melbourne for the last three decades.
Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost – or laying dormant – over the period of colonisation, as well as a leader in nurturing and promoting the diversity of contemporary southeast Aboriginal artists.
Maree’s continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revification of the traditional possum skin cloaks, together with the production of contemporary designs of kangaroo teeth necklaces, river reed necklaces and string headbands adorned with kangaroo teeth and echidna quills, in both traditional and contemporary materials such as glass and 3D printing.
Maree Clarke’s multi media installations of photography including lenticular prints, 3D photographs and photographic holograms as well as painting, sculpture and video installation further explore the customary ceremonies, rituals and language of her ancestors and reveal her long held ambitions to
facilitate cross-cultural dialogue about the ongoing effects of colonisation, while simultaneously
providing space for the Aboriginal community to engage with and ‘mourn’ the impact of
dispossession and loss.
Learn more about Maree and her work…
Visit Vivien Anderson Gallery
Watch this video about Maree by Australian Council for the Arts
View her artwork on display at MCA Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney
View details of Maree’s upcoming “Ancestral Memories” exhibition at NGV National Gallery of Victoria
(11 Jun 21 – 3 Oct 21)
Day Two: Vernon Ah Kee
Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.
Ah Kee’s work has been exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions, including ‘Revolutions: Forms that turn’, the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008); ‘Once Removed’, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2009); ‘Ideas of Barack’, National Gallery of Victoria (2011); ‘Tall Man’, Gertrude Contemporary (2011); ‘Everything Falls Apart’, Artspace Sydney (2012); ‘unDisclosed’: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial’, National Gallery of Australia (2012); ‘My Country: I Still Call Australia Home’, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (2013); and ‘Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art’, National Gallery of Canada (2013).
Learn more about Vernon and his work…
Visit Milani Gallery
Watch this video about Vernon by ABC Australia
View his artwork on display at MCA Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney
View his artwork on display at NGV National Gallery of Victoria
