Papers by Fran Edmonds
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Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art (Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo (REGAC)), 2020
Key words: eel traps; Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous sovereignty; collaborative methodologies; ... more Key words: eel traps; Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous sovereignty; collaborative methodologies; generosity.
ABSTRACT
In 2018, the Mutti Mutti/ Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung artist Maree Clarke was commissioned by the University of Melbourne to create two large scale eel traps for two very different sites. The first a spectacular glass eel trap for the newly renovated Old Quad – the oldest building on the University’s campus and the second, a 10-metre woven eel trap constructed at the Footscray Community Arts Centre in Melbourne’s inner-west. The story of the eel traps is a launch pad and an end point for our discussion about the Living Archive of Aboriginal Art. Like eels and the eel traps, Aboriginal knowledge has endured across millenia – and art-making supports processes for this knowledge to be sustained. We discuss a series of workshops held in Maree’s backyard/artist studio and argue that Maree’s generosity and willingness to share her art-making knowledge with broad networks of people, fosters communal bonds that instil a sense of collective responsibility for Aboriginal cultural knowledge. We then discuss the two eel trap artworks to show how their stories offer different possibilities for decolonising Western knowledge institutions (the university and the art gallery) through engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems. How this emerges through knowledge exchange in Maree’s backyard, we argue, reveals a Living Archive.
See this link for complete journal with corresponding article: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/REGAC/issue/view/2428/showToc
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Mapping Meaning, Issue 3: Archives and Photography, Editors Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Trudi Lynn Smith, pp. 38-64. , 2019
In the summer of 2019 (February-March), a group of graduate student volunteers from the Universit... more 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.
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Oceania, 2018
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un Magazine, 2018
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Interacting with Computers, 2017
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Visual Methodologies, 2015
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The South Project Inc. Online Publication, 2013
Recently, Aboriginal artists in southeast Australia have developed dynamic and innovative approac... more Recently, Aboriginal artists in southeast Australia have developed dynamic and innovative approaches to reclaiming the art practices of their Ancestors’. This process has stimulated a range of art exhibitions, workshops and educational programs that have inspired interest in the history and culture of Aboriginal people from the region. One of the artists central to this process is Maree Clarke, a Yorta Yorta/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman from northwest Victoria in Australia’s southeast.
Since the late 1980s, Maree’s work as an artist, curator, exhibition manager and cultural educator have provided some of the most innovative approaches to telling the stories of her people, as well as articulating the continuation and survival of Aboriginal culture and art practices from southeast Australia.
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This paper was originally published as Edmonds, F. and Clarke, M. (2013) ‘Contesting the past: The survival of Southeast Australian Aboriginal art in the 21st century’, in The South Project online publication, previously available at: http://mappingsouth.net/edmonds-clarke/, Weblink (URL) no longer available.
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University of Melbourne Research Fellow Fran Edmonds along with Victorian artists Lee Darroch, Ma... more University of Melbourne Research Fellow Fran Edmonds along with Victorian artists Lee Darroch, Maree Clarke and Vicki Couzens looks at the story of Aboriginal art in Victoria as a determined reclamation of the past, a cross-generational celebration in the present and a visionary guide for the future.
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reCollections, 2010
This paper focuses on several Aboriginal art exhibitions held since 1988 and includes a broad dis... more This paper focuses on several Aboriginal art exhibitions held since 1988 and includes a broad discussion of participating artists and their artworks. Taking this broad approach, rather than discussing individual artworks, illustrates the interconnectivity of art and culture and the importance of applying an integrated worldview to the exhibition process. Aboriginal-determined art exhibitions are part of an ongoing 'culture-making', where art, history and culture are made and remade as new ways of experiencing Aboriginality.[1] They have influenced a paradigm shift beyond the confining Western categories applied to Aboriginal people and their art styles, forcing a rethinking of the categories of fine art and high culture.[2]
https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/papers/we_have_survived
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Book Chapters by Fran Edmonds
Massive/Micro Autoethnography. Creative Learning in COVID Times. Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research, vol 4. In Harris, D.X., Luka, M.E., Markham, A.N. (eds) , Springer, Singapore-Based, 2022
Responding to Prompts #2 and #15 from the Massive Micro online experiment, held during the initia... more Responding to Prompts #2 and #15 from the Massive Micro online experiment, held during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020, our collaborative autoethnography explores the interconnections between the materiality of ‘things’ in a global pandemic. Here, our story focuses on ‘feather flowers’ from the Aboriginal community of Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land (currently held in Museums Victoria), our experiences of lockdown, and how the story of the feather flowers intersects with our experiences of ‘home’ as a ‘living archive’, in response to coalescing global crises. Our story is a collaborative/intercultural autoethnography written between four women—two Indigenous and two non-Indigenous—with the aim of progressing research which supports Indigenous knowledge systems to comprehend the relationality of everything. How we resolve to tell our story as an autoethnography reveals the continuing intersections of our lives across multiple contexts. Go to:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-8305-3_5
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Handbook of Qualitative Cross-Cultural Research Methods, edited by Pranee Liamputtong, 2022
In this chapter, we discuss a digital storytelling project conducted over three years with a coho... more In this chapter, we discuss a digital storytelling project conducted over three years with a cohort of 10 Aboriginal young people. The participants were alumni of the Korin Gamadji Institute (KGI). KGI recruits Aboriginal young people from across southeast Australia (mainly Victoria) to take part in Aboriginal youth leadership programs. Two workshops were conducted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), located in central Naarm/Melbourne, where young people acquired new digital skills and were exposed to a range of sophisticated media-making technologies. The final workshop shifted to Camp Jungai, a place of cultural significance for the Victorian Aboriginal community, where participants were able to experiment with mobile technologies (iPads and apps) and explore story-making in a community-based space. As a longitudinal study, the digital storytelling workshops exposed our developing intercultural research agenda as it progressed throughout the project. Researchers worked closely with KGI and the young participants to learn from them about their ambitions for the project, including young people's capacity to create innovative digital stories that reflected their identities and culture, alongside their lived experiences and ideas for the future. As an intercultural research project, the digital storytelling workshops revealed the significance of two-way learning and of supporting Aboriginal led programs to promote Indigenous knowledge exchange as an essential component in nurturing Aboriginal young people's connections to their culture and identity.
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Mobile story making in the age of smartphones, 2018
Between 2014 and 2016, a group of southeast Australian Aboriginal young people from Korin Gamadji... more Between 2014 and 2016, a group of southeast Australian Aboriginal young people from Korin Gamadji Institute (KGI) participated in three digital storytelling workshops, learning to use a range of digital technologies to assist in creative explorations of their culture and identities. The initial workshops were conducted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), where professional digital storytelling facilitators supported young participants to construct their stories in a studio-environment. Locating the final workshop at Camp Jungai, a place of cultural significance for Aboriginal Victorians, inspired participants’ creative use of mobile devices for story production. This chapter reveals one approach for providing Aboriginal youth with the capacity to control their explorations of culture through mobile story making, and the significance of a community-based setting.
Go to: http://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.fjmu.edu.cn/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-76795-6_4
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Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones, 2014
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Urban Representations , 2012
Since the early 1980s, Aboriginal artists across the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne have bee... more Since the early 1980s, Aboriginal artists across the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne have been creating large-scale, vibrantly painted murals that deliver political and social commentaries concerning Aboriginal histories. While the images are distinctly Aboriginal, portraying universal themes relating to the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands and their survival across the nation, they are also representations of specifi c stories and events that affect Aboriginal people in the southeast. The murals provide alternative approaches for Aboriginal people in the area to assert their Aboriginality and provide a visual language for 're-membering' history from an Aboriginal perspective. They are assertions of a continuing Aboriginal presence in the area, simultaneously contributing to the process of culture-making — where representations of Aboriginality are positioned as modern, urban, contemporary and authentic — and contesting ideas of Aboriginality as being fi xed in another time and place. Further, the capacity for murals to provide avenues to support cross-cultural dialogues between diverse groups encourages greater understandings of the continuing effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people today. While many Aboriginal people in the inner north continue to be marginalised, participation in the creation of the murals provides a means to engage in processes that reclaim culture and enhance the wellbeing of the Aboriginal community in the southeast .
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Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration And Convergence , Jul 15, 2009
This paper has grown from a number of
conversations between Fran Edmonds, a PhD
candidate at the ... more This paper has grown from a number of
conversations between Fran Edmonds, a PhD
candidate at the University of Melbourne, and
Vicki Couzens, a Gunditjmara/Kirrae Whurrong
woman and artist from the Western District of
Victoria. Over a period of three years, the women
have discussed the signifi cance of the possum-skincloak
project to the reclamation of Aboriginal arts
practices in southeast Australia. This paper draws
on these conversations, focusing on the signifi cance
of arts practices in reinforcing Aboriginality in the
southeast.
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Reports by Fran Edmonds
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Uploads
Papers by Fran Edmonds
ABSTRACT
In 2018, the Mutti Mutti/ Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung artist Maree Clarke was commissioned by the University of Melbourne to create two large scale eel traps for two very different sites. The first a spectacular glass eel trap for the newly renovated Old Quad – the oldest building on the University’s campus and the second, a 10-metre woven eel trap constructed at the Footscray Community Arts Centre in Melbourne’s inner-west. The story of the eel traps is a launch pad and an end point for our discussion about the Living Archive of Aboriginal Art. Like eels and the eel traps, Aboriginal knowledge has endured across millenia – and art-making supports processes for this knowledge to be sustained. We discuss a series of workshops held in Maree’s backyard/artist studio and argue that Maree’s generosity and willingness to share her art-making knowledge with broad networks of people, fosters communal bonds that instil a sense of collective responsibility for Aboriginal cultural knowledge. We then discuss the two eel trap artworks to show how their stories offer different possibilities for decolonising Western knowledge institutions (the university and the art gallery) through engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems. How this emerges through knowledge exchange in Maree’s backyard, we argue, reveals a Living Archive.
See this link for complete journal with corresponding article: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/REGAC/issue/view/2428/showToc
Go to url: https://unprojects.org.au/article/places-of-belonging-korin-gamadji-institute-the-sovereignty-exhibition-and-contemporary-aboriginal-youth-culture/
Since the late 1980s, Maree’s work as an artist, curator, exhibition manager and cultural educator have provided some of the most innovative approaches to telling the stories of her people, as well as articulating the continuation and survival of Aboriginal culture and art practices from southeast Australia.
---
This paper was originally published as Edmonds, F. and Clarke, M. (2013) ‘Contesting the past: The survival of Southeast Australian Aboriginal art in the 21st century’, in The South Project online publication, previously available at: http://mappingsouth.net/edmonds-clarke/, Weblink (URL) no longer available.
https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/papers/we_have_survived
Book Chapters by Fran Edmonds
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-8305-3_5
Go to: http://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.fjmu.edu.cn/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-76795-6_4
conversations between Fran Edmonds, a PhD
candidate at the University of Melbourne, and
Vicki Couzens, a Gunditjmara/Kirrae Whurrong
woman and artist from the Western District of
Victoria. Over a period of three years, the women
have discussed the signifi cance of the possum-skincloak
project to the reclamation of Aboriginal arts
practices in southeast Australia. This paper draws
on these conversations, focusing on the signifi cance
of arts practices in reinforcing Aboriginality in the
southeast.
Reports by Fran Edmonds
ABSTRACT
In 2018, the Mutti Mutti/ Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung artist Maree Clarke was commissioned by the University of Melbourne to create two large scale eel traps for two very different sites. The first a spectacular glass eel trap for the newly renovated Old Quad – the oldest building on the University’s campus and the second, a 10-metre woven eel trap constructed at the Footscray Community Arts Centre in Melbourne’s inner-west. The story of the eel traps is a launch pad and an end point for our discussion about the Living Archive of Aboriginal Art. Like eels and the eel traps, Aboriginal knowledge has endured across millenia – and art-making supports processes for this knowledge to be sustained. We discuss a series of workshops held in Maree’s backyard/artist studio and argue that Maree’s generosity and willingness to share her art-making knowledge with broad networks of people, fosters communal bonds that instil a sense of collective responsibility for Aboriginal cultural knowledge. We then discuss the two eel trap artworks to show how their stories offer different possibilities for decolonising Western knowledge institutions (the university and the art gallery) through engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems. How this emerges through knowledge exchange in Maree’s backyard, we argue, reveals a Living Archive.
See this link for complete journal with corresponding article: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/REGAC/issue/view/2428/showToc
Go to url: https://unprojects.org.au/article/places-of-belonging-korin-gamadji-institute-the-sovereignty-exhibition-and-contemporary-aboriginal-youth-culture/
Since the late 1980s, Maree’s work as an artist, curator, exhibition manager and cultural educator have provided some of the most innovative approaches to telling the stories of her people, as well as articulating the continuation and survival of Aboriginal culture and art practices from southeast Australia.
---
This paper was originally published as Edmonds, F. and Clarke, M. (2013) ‘Contesting the past: The survival of Southeast Australian Aboriginal art in the 21st century’, in The South Project online publication, previously available at: http://mappingsouth.net/edmonds-clarke/, Weblink (URL) no longer available.
https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/papers/we_have_survived
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-8305-3_5
Go to: http://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.fjmu.edu.cn/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-76795-6_4
conversations between Fran Edmonds, a PhD
candidate at the University of Melbourne, and
Vicki Couzens, a Gunditjmara/Kirrae Whurrong
woman and artist from the Western District of
Victoria. Over a period of three years, the women
have discussed the signifi cance of the possum-skincloak
project to the reclamation of Aboriginal arts
practices in southeast Australia. This paper draws
on these conversations, focusing on the signifi cance
of arts practices in reinforcing Aboriginality in the
southeast.