Selling Yarns 2

Innovation for sustainability

 

Papers

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Clothing the postcolonial body: art, artefacts and appropriation

Session: Perspectives on practice Saturday 7 March 2009 1:10 - 2:20pm

Sylvia Kleinert

Associate professor of Australian indigenous Art, Charles Darwin University

Abstract

For Indigenous Australians dress has always fulfilled multiple roles as part of both ceremonial life and everyday life. With colonisation clothing has come to fulfill an even more complex role, vital to understanding how Aboriginal people have engaged in cross cultural relations with Europeans. Nowhere is this more significant than in south eastern Australia, where colonization first occurred. Here, as in other parts of Australia, Indigenous people have deliberately implemented adjustment movements, maintained or revived past practices and incorporated from colonial dress to make a political statement.

This paper focuses on the diverse strategies implemented by contemporary Koorie artists in relation to clothing. I will discuss the cultural revival of traditional forms of dress such as possum skin cloaks, the transformation of fibre artifacts - once worn or carried on the body - into artworks and the appropriation of colonial dress as an expression of contemporary Aboriginality.

See also: Sylvia Kleinert's biography