Worn Grief: Interlaced Approaches to Wearing Your Loss with Pia Interlandi, Maree Clarke, Kerri Clarke & Hini Hanara

Following on from their 2024 ‘Interlacing of Garments for the Grave and Cloak Making’ Maree Clarke and Pia Interlandi are back with their collaborators Kerrie Clarke and Hini Hanara to bring a second interlacing to the Death Fest.

Worn Grief: Interlaced approaches to wearing your loss, will bring perspectives from several key bodies of work from the facilitators, including Maree Clarke’s, “Ritual and Ceremony”, and “Grief Garments” led by Pia Interlandi and Hini Hanara.

Following a discussion where the facilitators will draw on their practices, they will host an interlaced workshop for participants where, together, we will explore what it means to wear what we have lost and to wear what we live without.

Participants will be requested to bring a light coloured t-shirt to transform, along with a sentimental object and portrait of a person, pet, or place they grieve.

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

Intersecting fashion and funerals, Dr Pia Interlandi explores materials and materiality in relation to dress, death, and decomposition. Through her creative practice research, Garments for the Grave, she designs rituals for facilitating dressing, and addressing the dead body. This practice encourages audiences to consider what they will wear in death, initiating their own end-of-life plan. Pia also works with the dying to co-design a final garment and then supports their families to dress their body in personalised ritual for the funeral.

Harnessing a toolkit of skills that combine tacit and explicit knowledge bases, Pia intermeshes scholarly and professional practice, interlacing personal reflection, community engagement, and the rigor(mortis) of academia.

Dr Pia Interlandi has recently relocated to Perth, Western Australia to undertake a new academic appointment as Associate Professor of Creative Practice in the School of Design and the Built Environment at Curtin University.

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.

-HINI HERARA

Hini (Ngati Kahungunu) is a self-described ‘Decolonising Death Daddy.’ They’re a social change artist and fashion designer. Founder of ‘Queer as Death Collective’ and creator of ‘Corpse Couture’ death literacy experience.  

Hini's cultural practices of Tangihanga guide their desire to see more community-led death care.