Selling Yarns

Australian Indigenous textiles and good business in the 21st century

 

Papers

A story is like a River: Intercultural collaboration in Weaving the Murray

Session: Collaborations 3:35 - 4:55 pm, Sunday, 13 August 2006

Kay Lawrence

Head, South Australian School of Art

Abstract

Full paper published on the Craft Australia Research Centre

Deborah Bird Rose in her recent book, Reports from a Wild Country; ethics for decolonisation notes the position of white people who are members of the settler culture in Australia.

'We cannot help knowing that we are here through dispossession and death.'

This is a shocking proposition, and very uncomfortable position for those of us who are white. Yet to ignore this proposition is to concede to a continuation of a present 'violence', perhaps not now enacted through dispossession and death but through a type of violence that sets the past aside and ignores the 'vulnerability of others.'

Rose suggests an ethical position that 'would replace (this) violence with responsive attentiveness' an attentiveness located in the here and now, that takes account of the past, and is based on listening to Aboriginal people talking back 'in their own terms'.

This type of dialogue is risky business. As whites we may hear things that we'd rather not know, difficult things. Listening to people 'talking back' may raise questions that are not easily answered.

In 2001, three Indigenous and four non-indigenous artists formed a team to design and make a collaborative art work Weaving the Murray to celebrate the Centenary of the Federation of Australia in 1901.

While the Weaving the Murray installation and exhibition was a great public success, shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia and exhibited during the Adelaide Festival at the Prospect Gallery in 2002, the success of a collaborative project can also be measured by how the difficulties and tensions that inevitably arise during the designing and making processes are negotiated and resolved.

While we resolved most of the problems to create a thoughtful, technically and conceptually complex art work within a very tight time frame, there were some tensions evident during the process of making the work that were not so satisfactorily addressed.

This discussion between two of the artists, Nici Cumpston and Kay Lawrence reflects on the collaborative process and draws on interviews conducted with each of the artists after the project, to talk candidly about the benefits and the difficulties of working across cultures, of the need to listen as well as talk, and to talk back.

See also: Kay Lawrence's biography