Artistic practice can express how a person understands their place in the world.
Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander understandings of Country hold relationships between people, land, water, living things, family, ancestors, culture and responsibility. These relationships extend across generations. Artistic practice can carry knowledge, memory and connection through time.
This understanding of art raises a larger question about the place of the artist.
Western art history has given great importance to the individual artist. Personal vision, originality, authorship and the development of a distinct artistic voice have shaped many accounts of art and artistic achievement. The artist often appears as an individual making sense of experience through their own practice.
First Nations artistic practices can reveal a different relationship between the artist and the world. In practices such as Maree Clarke’s, the artist works within connections to Country, family, community, cultural knowledge and previous generations. Making can carry these relationships forward.
An individual artistic voice can grow from personal experience while also being shaped by place, culture, history and community. The balance between these relationships changes across artists and practices.
The central inquiry becomes:
What is an artist in relation to the world around them?
The sequence gradually widens the frame around the artist. Personal experience is considered alongside place. Place leads into culture and belonging. Cultural knowledge raises questions of continuity and responsibility. History and collaboration bring position, authorship and cultural authority into view.
Mark + meaning
Mark making carries the same inquiry into practice. A mark can begin with one person. A mark can emerge from memory, movement or experience. Through repetition and use, marks can become part of an artist’s visual language.
Marks can also carry meanings that come from shared cultural knowledge. In many First Nations artistic practices, marks, patterns, materials and processes are connected to particular people, places, histories and cultural knowledge. Their meaning comes from those relationships and from the authority to hold and share that knowledge.
Students examine how meaning enters marks across different artistic practices. They then develop marks from their own experiences, memories, places and ideas. Their marks begin as personal forms. As students repeat, combine and adjust them, relationships develop between the marks. A visual language begins to form.
This gives students a practical way to investigate the same question they are considering through artists:
What can a mark carry?
Meaning develops through the relationship between the mark, the person who made it, its context and the way it is used.
Looking at another artist’s marks therefore involves more than recognising a shape or symbol. Interpretation requires attention to the practice and knowledge around it.
The mark also brings questions of authorship and responsibility into the sequence. A student can learn from the way another artist uses marks to carry meaning while developing a visual language grounded in their own experience and context.
Unit 2 / Area of Study 1
Unit 2 Area of Study 1 asks students to use the Cultural Lens, with other Interpretive Lenses where appropriate, to analyse and compare artists, artworks and artistic practices from different cultures and times.
The conceptual inquiry gives those requirements a connected structure. Students consider how personal experience, place, culture, history, relationships, artistic practice and visual language shape meaning.
The five learning sequences provide points of entry into that inquiry:
- 01 / Personal experience + meaning
- 02 / Place + visual language
- 03 / Country + cultural continuity
- 04 / Position + cultural authority
- 05 / Comparison + interpretation