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.
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.
The Village (Saturday evening)
In our hyper-individualist culture, an enormous burden today is put on families and individuals to do what in the past was done by whole communities. If it is true that it takes a village to bring up a child, it also takes one to support a person who is dying or grieving. For the Saturday evening of the festival, we want to cultivate village-mindedness by curating a diverse array of offerings, experiences, testimonies and performances, which do justice to the spectrum of what it is to be mortal with others on Gadigal land in 2024.
In our hyper-individualist culture, an enormous burden today is put on families and individuals to do what in the past was done by whole communities. If it is true that it takes a village to bring up a child, it also takes one to support a person who is dying or grieving. For the Saturday evening of the festival, we want to cultivate village-mindedness by curating a diverse array of offerings, experiences, testimonies and performances, which do justice to the spectrum of what it is to be mortal with others on Gadigal land in 2024.
Closing Grief Ceremony with Boats (Sunday Evening)
The closing ceremony will be an opportunity to gather the whole festival together at sunset and will involve a water departure at the Rushcutters' Bay jetty.
The closing ceremony will be an opportunity to gather the whole festival together at sunset and will involve a water departure at the Rushcutters' Bay jetty.
Shedding: A Ritual of Grief and Eros with Alessandra Massi
Join us for a group ritual to heal, to open our hearts, and to free up energy so we can respond in wise and loving ways. Our bodies are instruments of energy and love. Many of us are experiencing trauma, outrage, fear, grief, despair, numbness… all of these are natural human responses to our crises. This ritual is an invitation to release what is eating at our soul.
Join us for a group ritual to heal, to open our hearts, and to free up energy so we can respond in wise and loving ways. Our bodies are instruments of energy and love. Many of us are experiencing trauma, outrage, fear, grief, despair, numbness… all of these are natural human responses to our crises. This ritual is an invitation to release what is eating at our soul.
Breathe, move, feel, and vocalize to make space for this energy so we can choose to direct it in powerful loving ways. Both eros and grief open the flow of energy in our hearts and entire beings.
If you want to control a society, teach them to be ashamed of who they are and what they deeply desire. They will lose a sense of what's possible. Many people have lived and died in a restricted sense of what is possible and have passed that along through generations. This ritual invites you to tremble open to see a future beyond these restrictions, a future we can be proud of together.
The Consolation of Poetry with Luke Fischer
Poetry possesses a unique capacity to reconcile us with death and mourning, to affirm life in the face of death's inevitability, and to offer forms of spiritual solace. Poets often write about death, and funerals (along with weddings) are one of the few public occasions on which poetry is frequently read.
Poetry possesses a unique capacity to reconcile us with death and mourning, to affirm life in the face of death's inevitability, and to offer forms of spiritual solace. Poets often write about death, and funerals (along with weddings) are one of the few public occasions on which poetry is frequently read.
In this workshop, poet and philosopher Luke Fischer will discuss both his own poetry and the work of other poets in connection with the experiences of death and grief. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss how they have found consolation in poetry and are welcome to bring poems to share with the group.
Modern Philosophical Approaches to Death and Dying with Dalia Nassar and Peter Banki
Death and dying are multi-faceted and deeply ambivalent experiences. There is not one true way of thinking about and understanding them. Come learn about the diverse and often irreconcilable perspectives of philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida on death and dying.
In this workshop we are going to depart by reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s last unfinished poem: “Come you, you last one”. This will open the space for a discussion of four of the most influential theses on death and dying in twentieth century Western philosophy:
1. Our unconscious, which is to say, the greatest part of our psyche, does not know or believe in death (Freud);
2. Understanding that our death is possible is the condition for any authentic selfhood and historical existence (Heidegger);
3. Our relation to our death is firstly through the other, whose death has a philosophical and ethical priority (Levinas);
4. Our relation to ourselves is a priori posthumous; anticipatory mourning is the fundamental condition for any relation to ourselves and others (Derrida).
Compassionate Communities: a Panel Discussion led by Harpreet Kalsi
Compassionate communities are a core part of public health approaches to palliative care, end of life care and bereavement. The term was coined by Allan Kellehear in the mid-2000s to describe communities which play a much stronger role in the care of people at end of life and their families and carers through illness, dying, death and bereavement.
Bringing local residents, schools, businesses, groups and healthcare services together, Compassionate Communities is a network to promote and support kindness, friendship and a collaborative approach to caring for one another at times of health crisis and personal loss.
10 Years on Where Are We?
Join Harpreet Kalsi-Smith, Board Director of Compassionate Communities Australia, as she facilitates a panel on where we are 10 years on in compassionate community based death and dying in Australia.
We will consider:
What's going well and what needs to be changed?
What are compassionate communities doing? What more can be done?
What are the intersects between compassionate communities and the health system
How can home based palliative care be accessed?
Singing Out Our Losses with Jess Aszodi
Western culture has forgotten our mourning songs. Where is the keening, the laments, the uncontrolled wails? Those deep, untameable tones that are the native language of grief? Like tears, they need to be released.
Western culture has forgotten our mourning songs. Where is the keening, the laments, the uncontrolled wails? Those deep, untameable tones that are the native language of grief? Like tears, they need to be released.
In this workshop we will form a temporary village of grieving voices. No singing experience is necessary. Just some courage. Using exercises of breath and sound and communal support, I will invite you to get curious about where grief lives in your body. Holding and attending to these hurts with your own sound. We will seek as yet unsung demons of grief and make an exit wound of our throats.
Grief can feel isolating. But it also holds powerful connective potential. Together we will compassionately share and bear witness to folks singing, crying, wailing or whispering their many losses. Creating a communal song that will live on outside our individual selves, a bridge between what’s here and what’s next.