Interlacing Cloak Making and Garments for the Grave with Pia Interlandi Maree Clarke and Kerri Clarke

Join Maree Clarke, a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, her niece, Boon Wurrung artist Kerri Clarke and acclaimed fashion designer, Pia Interlandi, as they bring together their practices for the first time.

Cloak Making

Dr Pia Interlandi is a design pracademic in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University. Intersecting fashion and funerals, Pia explores materials and materiality in relation to dress, death, and decomposition. Recent work, ‘Rituals of Obsolescence’, speculates a circular system for death rituals on Mars, intertwining life and death through a symbiotic silk production cycle.

Through her practice, Garments for the Grave, Pia designs rituals for facilitating dressing, and addressing the dead body. She co-designs garments with the terminally ill and dresses them with family for their funerals.

Exhibited at MoMA (New York), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), and the Science Museum (London), most of her work is in graves across Australia and the UK. A founding member of the Order of the Good Death, Natural Death Advocacy Network and Australian Death Studies Society, Pia has spent over a decade advocating for creativity at end of life.

My art is about regenerating cultural practises, making people aware of, you know, our culture, and that we are a really strong culture, and that we haven't lost anything; I think they've just been, some of these practises have been laying dormant for a while.”

— MAREE CLAKE

Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost – or laying dormant – over the period of colonisation, as well as a leader in nurturing and promoting the diversity of contemporary southeast Aboriginal artists.

Maree’s continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revification of the traditional possum skin cloaks, together with the production of contemporary designs of kangaroo teeth necklaces, river reed necklaces and string headbands adorned with kangaroo teeth and echidna quills, in both traditional and contemporary materials such as glass and 3D printing.

Maree Clarke’s multi media installations of photography including lenticular prints, 3D photographs and photographic holograms as well as painting, sculpture and video installation further explore the customary ceremonies, rituals and language of her ancestors and reveal her long held ambitions to facilitate cross-cultural dialogue about the ongoing effects of colonisation, while simultaneously providing space for the Aboriginal community to engage with and ‘mourn’ the impact of dispossession and loss.

Maree is known for her open and collaborative approach to cultural practice. She consistently works in intergenerational collaboration to revive dormant cultural knowledge – and uses technology to bring new audiences to contemporary southeast Aboriginal arts.

Maree Clarke has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and in 2021 she was the subject of a major survey exhibition Maree Clarke – Ancestral Memories at the National Gallery of Victoria. Other recent exhibitions includeTarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2021), The National, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2021), Reversible Destiny, Tokyo Photographic Museum, Tokyo Japan (2021) and the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary Art Prize, for which she was awarded the Victorian Artist award. In 2020 she was awarded the Linewide Commission for the Metro Tunnel project (current) and is the recipient of the 2020 Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fellowship.

KERRI CLARKE

Kerri Clarke is an artist of Boon Wurrung descent in south-eastern Australia. Kerri is skilled in a variety of methods, including sewing and working with animal skins. Like her aunt, Maree Clarke, Kerri is active in the resurgence of traditional Aboriginal Australian artistic methods. She is also a counsellor who works with families in New South Wales.