Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture
Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture is now showing at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. This beautiful exhibition exposes the richness and breadth of contemporary Indigenous sculpture in Australia.
With a focus on works depicting animals Menagerie includes both well-known and emerging artists who share with us a huge variety of ideas and cultural knowledge, using techniques that combine traditional materials with contemporary applications.
The amazing range of artists include Vicki West from Tasmania who works with bull kelp; Badger Bates from Western NSW who in found objects; Marina Murdilnga from Maningrida working with twined pandanus fibre and Torres Strait Islander sculptor, Dennis Nona who works in bronze and aluminium casting.
These expressions of Aboriginal identity and ongoing connections to country highlight the sophistication and complexity of the art and culture of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.
Co-curator and artist, Wiradjuri woman, Nicole Foreshew, is interested in the exchange between objects and people as well as the relationships between objects and people and art and museum institutions. “I am interested in the different modes of ethnographic research, how artefacts or objects are collected and how it is implied that objects are used, how they have been made and of most interest is who made them. This exhibitionMenagerie was an opportunity for me to extend my interest in that conversation.” Nicola Foreshew, Co-curator and artist.
Catherine Hickson, Assistant Curator
More info:
12 July to 14 October 2012
National Museum of Australia First Australians Focus Gallery