Acquisition of Aboriginal Artwork for Wyndham's Reconciliation Action Plan
As we continue to work towards reconciliation, Wyndham City’s growing art collection has been informed by the concept of Foregrounding as a curatorial theme.
Foregrounding is an approach that preferences First Nations ways of Knowing and Being, as a way to frame working with place, story, and connection.
The power of art and the importance of cultural practice is demonstrated in these new acquisitions purchased by Council. The works will be shared with the community as part of a new exhibition ENDURING (8 June – 30 July) and have been embedded as key design elements into the RAP document.
Wyndham’s first RAP in 2017 included a Cultural Document in the form of a community Possum Skin Cloak created with the community, led by Maree Clarke and the late Les Tregonning. This work is part of Wyndham City’s Art Collection and is on permanent display at the Civic Centre.
The purchase of these three new works reflect both recognised Traditional Custodians in the beautiful digital work by Kobi Summers (Bunurong), and the observational historical painting by Aunty Marlene Gilson (Wathaurung) (Wadawurrung) as well as a work by Maree Clarke, (Mutti Mutti, Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta, Boonwurrung artist), representing the community and Aboriginal Diaspora who are now connected to the place we call Wyndham.
Kobi Summers
Artist Bio
Kobi Summers is a young emerging Aboriginal Artist, who is a Proud Bunurong Man living in Melbourne. He specialises in Digital Art, Contemporary aboriginal Canvas Art, Mural Art and Clothing Art.
Artist Statement
This artwork is a story of life over coming darkness. Rebirth and renewal.
As a Bunurong person this story means a lot to my people, this represents community past, present and future and the struggles we have had to overcome to become the people we are today in the world.
Aunty Marlene Gilson
Artist Bio
Aunty Marlene Gilson is a Wathaurung (Wadawarrung) Elder living on country in Gordon, near Ballarat.
Marlene Gilson’s multi-figure paintings work to overturn the colonial grasp on the past by reclaiming and re-contextualising the representation of historical events. Learning her Wathaurung history from her grandmother, Gilson began painting while recovering from an illness.
The artist’s meticulously rendered works display a narrative richness and theatrical quality akin to the traditional genre of history painting. Gilson, however, privileges those stories relating to her ancestral land, which covers Ballarat, Werribee, Geelong, Skipton and the Otway Ranges in Victoria.
Often including her two totems, Bunjil the Eagle and Waa the Crow, Gilson’s paintings not only reconfigure historical narratives, but display her spiritual connection to Country.
Artist Statement
Waa Waa – Crow Feathers is a painting from Aunty Marlene Gilson’s 2022 exhibition ‘Bunjil Wour Kun Ya – Spirit of My Ancestors’. This work tells the story of Waa-Waa, the first Wadawurrung to see a white man, Matthew Flinders and his crew surveying the southern Australian coastline near the You Yangs on 1 May 1802.
Speaking to Wyndham Art Gallery’s curatorial framework themes of Foregrounding, Habitat and Localism, the work portrays in Wadawurrung lore the first sighting of a European and acknowledges Australian First Nations peoples original and ongoing connections with land, history, politics and knowledges of place. The scene is overlooking the You Yangs which is deeply connected with the local place and habitat of the Werribee Plain.
Maree Clarke
Artist Bio
Maree Clarke, a Mutti Mutti, Yorta Yorta, BoonWurrung woman from Mildura in northwest Victoria, is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Melbourne.
Maree’s practice is dedicated to renewing South-Eastern Australian Aboriginal cultural practices, galvanizing culture and passing on of Aboriginal knowledge. Maree’s art making includes a wide variety of mediums such as photography, sculpture, printmaking, and jewellery. River Reed Necklace is included in a body of work dedicated to recreating traditional necklaces at a larger-than-life scale. The supersizing of the work echoes the enormous amount of loss in Aboriginal culture due to colonisation. It also stands large and proud celebrating the oldest continuing culture in the world and is connected to Wyndham Art Gallery’s curatorial theme of Foregrounding.
Artist statement
This specific necklace, at 50 meters long and was thread at Footscray Community Arts Centre to accommodate its length. The cockatoo and crow feathers used in the necklace ring true to Wyndham’s diverse Habitat (another curatorial theme) and the abundance bird life that make up the eco-system of the West which includes the Western Treatment Plant, Point Cook Coastal Park, Heathdale Glen Orden Wetlands and the Werribee River.
