Sunday 2 April
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Join artists Maree Clarke and Rod McNicol in conversation with MAPh Senior Curator Angela Connor to discuss their personal and artistic journeys, their unique creative processes, and the potency and significance of the human image.
Maree Clarke is a Mutti Mutti/Yorta Yorta and Boon Wurrung/Wemba Wemba woman from north-east Victoria. She is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of south-east Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices and a leader in nurturing and promoting the diversity of contemporary south-east Aboriginal artists. Her works in 100 faces – 'Jack Charles', 'Carolyn Briggs', 'Kent Morris' and 'Maree Clarke' – belong to a series called Ritual and ceremony (2012) which includes 84 named portraits of Aboriginal men and women from Victoria painted in ochre to represent the mourning practices of Aboriginal people along the Murray/Darling rivers. The series speaks about the legacy of the colonial past and challenges the erasure of Indigenous makers' names from historical collections.
Rod McNicol studied photography at Prahran College in the 1970s and completed an MFA (Monash University) in 2007. He has lived and worked in an old warehouse/studio in Fitzroy for more than four decades now, pursuing his passion for photographic portraiture. Drawing his sitters from the inner urban life around him, his ‘village’ as he calls it, McNicol combines a gentle stillness with an unrelenting directness to pare portraiture back to its bare essence.
Free event
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