Country, Kin & Kith: Coming Home to Culture Through Art

Abstract

‘Coming home to Country’ is an evocative descriptor that is spoken in many languages and dialects in Australia by all sorts of people. As a newcomer to Country over forty years ago, raising a family of five sons and daughters and practising as a printmaker, I am always immersed in someone else’s ‘Home Country’, one that is, for many of the Aboriginal owners, an often-contested (but never ceded), space both politically and socially. I have come to respect and appreciate another culture’s Country while also trying to find a small space for myself and family to belong, amongst the business of caring for both. This need to belong and need to respect a culture for whom Country is family, progenitor, ancestral lore-keeper and mythical actor, has found me wandering restlessly along the riparian fringe of intercultural agency searching for a path to reconcile those needs. In the midst of such profound inspiration, the only clear questions to research have been ‘how do I connect with my own visual ancestral culture in a meaningful way?’ and ‘what forms will that take as a printmaking artist?’ Utilising a practice-led art research methodology effectively guides me as a researcher to questions that emerge as a natural part of art creation . Art, as both the question and the answer, requires an auto-ethnographical method of self-enquiry to describe the processes of drawing forth an aesthetic concept into gestural form. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is not enough to describe how internal creative forces translate into an external image and how, by following the muscle memory of my ancestors in re-creating their art-forms, I am conjugated with the collective mind of my ancestral culture. The process of the creation of those grounds upon which I imprint the symbology of the only art-form indigenous to my Celtic homelands of Eire and Alba has become an act of mindful reverence, engaging my consciousness (through eyes and hands), in personal contemplation of the numinous .