Selling Yarns

Australian Indigenous textiles and good business in the 21st century

 

Speakers

Gary Lee: Biography

Artist, PhD candidate

I'm a Larrakia person born and raised in Darwin on Larrakia country where I've always lived except for periods of education and employment down south mainly in Canberra and Sydney.

I come from a large, creative family of seven brothers and four sisters who are all high achievers which we probably inherited from our ancestors and both parents. When I was seventeen I went to England to visit an uncle and he encouraged me to go to India where I lived for two and a half years mostly in Calcutta (now Kolkata). It changed my life.

I came back to Australia and spent one year at Alexander Mackie Art School and another year at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) both in Sydney. I wanted to major in painting and drawing which were my main interests and at SCA I tried other arts such as design, photography, glass and jewellery. I supplemented my Abstudy while at art school by doing fashion designing with a friend who'd opened a shop at Sydney's Centrepoint. We became so successful I dropped out of SCA and started living the high lifein Sydney's fashion scene.

After a couple of years I'd had enough and returned to Darwin and got a job in Katherine as a trainee art and craft adviser at Mimi Arts and Crafts. After 12 months I was a fully fledged arts adviser and stayed three years until I went to the Australian National University (ANU) to study anthropology where I graduated with honours in 1991.

Since then I've worked as an Aboriginal art curator, designer, researcher and writer. Some highlights of my career so far have been, winning the 1987 Canberra Fashion Awards; graduating from the ANU; commencing my photo portrait series Nice Coloured Boys in India in 1994; curating Love Magic for Sydney's Perspecta '99; and designing the 2000/2001 Millennium and 2001/2002 New Year's Eve art work on Sydney Harbour Bridge. I'm halfway through my PhD researching a Larrakia ethnography and further exploring my own photography art practice.

See also: Abstract of Gary Lee's paper:
Welcome to Larrakia country