The theme of this year's conference is reimagining the material: artists books, printed matter, digital transformation, engagement. The Queensland chapter has managed, despite Covid-19, to put together a conference with both onsite and online options - I opted to attend online. Despite a hiccup in the livestream during the keynote (and a mixup in slide), this so far seems to be going well. It's definitely easier for me to tweet during the conference, though not as easy to add images to my tweets.
The opening keynote was delivered by Fiona Foley, a Badjtala artist and academic, from K'gari (Fraser Island to us white folks). It was fascinating. Foley's family has a long tradition of writing and publishing with her uncle, Wilf Reeves, publishing the first Indigenous children's book in 1964 - The Legends of Moonie Jarl. Foley showed us some of the pages and the illustrations are incredibly beautiful. Her mother, Shirley Foley, spent twenty years putting together a Badtjala-English word list. Badtjala can be considered an endangered language as only older people now speak some of the words. Foley herself has written several books (her latest book is Biting the Clouds - see image below) and she has undertaken considerable historical research to uncover the history of the Badtjala people but also other Aboriginal nations in Queensland. This research is also critical to her art practice.
Her keynote was titled Lifting the Veil on Aboriginal Knowledges, and she lamented the absence of not only of critical race studies in our universities but also the almost complete absence of anything to do with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in our education system. As she said, ignorance is no longer an excuse and it should not be up to our Indigenous to teach and embed this history in our curricula. In her paper, she mentioned several important historical works that influenced her and I'm looking forward to getting these references.
As an aside, she gave a shout-out to the effort to save the printmaking studio at Queensland College of the Arts, which is under threat of closure.
The first session after morning tea was themed Reimagined Collections and Archives and featured papers from Eric Riddler of the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the digitisation of a major slide collection and its uses, Keri Klumpp of the University of Queensland on the digitisation of the Daphne Mayo Archive and how it was being used in research, Jacklyn Young from QAGOMA on the Peter Tyndall/Robert MacPherson Correspondence Archive and its use in exhibitions, Tim Mosely from the Queensland College of the Arts and his explorations of the haptic in his art practice and whether it would translate into a digital collection, and Russell Craig and Therese Nolan-Brown on the development ot the Queensland College of the Arts Print Archive.
The variety of materials and uses explored in these papers was fascinating, covering digital and material, sight and touch, art techniques and research methods. Unfortunately, due to technical issues, I missed the first part of Eric's paper and will have to watch it in full after the conference when it's made available online.
The second session was devoted to artists' residencies in libraries and covered the Printer-in-Residence program at the University of Sydney Library, using an antique Albion letterpress printer, Clyde McGill's meditations on material space, including looking, listening, and walking, and Seth Ellis's work in identifying hidden historical sounds in the State Library of Queensland's collections and finding ways to describe it so that it can be found by users.
Each residency was very different from the other, with very different outputs. Although the first two did produce artists' books, the Printer-in-Residence program also produced posters and McGill produced a kind of visual authority by overprinting old cataluge authority cards with images.
The morning sessions covered a wide range of topics: memory, history, touch, sound, materiality, space, production, different ways of marking our presence in this world and saying something about it. It was a very good start to the conference.
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