Image details
Source: Pexels Free Photos
By Myles Russell Cook, Swinburne University of Technology/Senior Curator of Australian and First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
10 April 2014
It’s not difficult to find reference to Indigenous ethnographic designs in contemporary Australia. Motifs from Adelaide’s Balarinji Design Studios coat Qantas’ Boeing fleet and elders wore Victorian possum skin cloaks at the 2006 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in Melbourne.
What is more difficult is determining the nature of the relationship between contemporary Indigenous people and the design world at large.
The inaugural Australian Indigenous Fashion Week (AIFW) which opens in Sydney tonight has quickly – in the lead-up – become a landmark for Australian fashion. It is providing a platform for Aboriginal designers such as Grace Lee, Mia Brennan, Alison Page, Lucy Simpson and Desert Designs to showcase their work.
Many of the principles we associate with “design” were formed by the Bauhaus, a German school of design originating in Weimar in 1919, accentuating simplicity and the sense that form is dictated by function. The centrality of this form of design is to some extent fixed in the design world. Aboriginal design has consequently been marginalised and given less agency in the creative world. Aboriginal design is hardly ever referred to as such, and is often dismissed as craft or art.
But designing, as a creative practice, has always been an integral part of Aboriginal communities in Australia. While Bauhaus design is widely regarded as the pinnacle of international design, it most certainly isn’t the oldest.
Read the full article at The Conversation.
Ad(dressing) Indigeneity 