Constructing Place: Australian Aboriginal Art Practice at the Cultural Aesthetic Interface

Abstract

This exegesis frames my creative research. It details the cultural theories, histories, artists, arts practices and creative processes that have influenced the project. The exegesis provides an insight into the creative journey, conceptual thinking and arts products that have assisted me in answering the research question - Can artworks become a form of cultural agency whereby Aboriginal Place is realised not reconceptualised? Drawing from place-based methodologies, post-colonial theories, subaltern studies and Aboriginal ways of working, this research aspired to engage the viewer within a dialectic that realised the tensions and challenges Aboriginal artists have in presenting a sense of Place within artworks. It considered how Aboriginal art can both educe and challenge viewers’ cultural constructions of Aboriginal peoples, which impact on the reception, promotion and categorisation of Aboriginal art. The project asked, if whiteness is the imposed spatial aesthetic, how can Aboriginal Place, a culturally and communally held understanding of the world ever be realised? The creative research considered to what extent an Aboriginal artwork is both ‘a white thing’ and ‘a black thing’. The research interrogated knowledge intersections, Western and Indigenous, located within the cultural aesthetic interface. Through creative praxis artificial binaries existing within the Australian arts industry - traditional and contemporary, remote and urban, authentic and inauthentic, individual and collective - were challenged.