Curator

Jessica Clark

born nipaluna/Hobart, lutruwita/trouwerner (Tasmania)
lives and works on Wurundjeri Country

Jessica Clark is a proud palawa/pallawah woman with English, Irish, Turkish, and French ancestry. She is a curator of contemporary art living and working on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne. Clark currently holds the position of Yalingwa Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022- 24. Her background in art history and art education has informed the development of an independent curatorial practice that is guided by conversation and collaboration, and grounded in an understanding of the interrelationship between life, materiality, and place. Recent independent and collaborative exhibition projects include breathing space, and one (&) another, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Naarm, 2021 and 2020; In and of this place, Benalla Art Gallery Online, 2021, and Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art national touring exhibition, 2021-2023. Clark is a participant in the International Curators Program: Asia Pacific Triennial x TarraWarra Biennial, 2021-2023 and alumni of PIAD: First Nations Colloquium, South Africa, 2019, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Cultural Keepers Program, 2017-2020, Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Program, 2018, Signature Works: Innovation Lab, 2018, and the First Nations Curators Program for the Venice Biennale, 2017. She is a recent graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, having completed a curatorial practice-led PhD that investigated intercultural curatorial models for contemporary Australian art.

Contributors

Tina Baum

lives and works in Kamberri (Australian Capital Territory)

Tina Baum, Gulumirrgin-Larrakia/Wardaman/ Karajarri peoples, has over 30 years working in Australian Museums and Galleries. She is a writer and the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of Australia since 2005. She curated the Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, 2017, the Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, 2021-23 national and international touring exhibition and the Emerging Elders exhibition, 2009.

Baum is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts 2022-23 International Curators Program Asia Pacific Triennial x TarraWarra Biennial, the 2021-22 Art Monthly Australasia, Indigenous Voices Program (writing) as a mentor, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Leaders Program, 2020-22, and the inaugural British Council Accelerate Programme to the UK, 2009. She is a mentor to alumni, presenter and organiser of the NGA and Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership and Fellowship Programs since 2010.

She is passionate about embedding Indigenous voices, perspectives and truth telling and Indigenising best practice methodologies within Museum and Galleries throughout Australia and internationally by reasserting Indigenous traditional language, cultural authority and agency.

Natalie Harkin

lives and works in Kaurna Yarta (South Australia)

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga poet and academic living on Kaurna Yarta, South Australia, and currently a Research Fellow at Flinders University. She engages archival-poetic methods to document community Memory Stories, decolonise state archives, and she is a member of South Australia’s inaugural State Records/State Library of South Australia’s Aboriginal Reference Group. Her research centres on Aboriginal women’s domestic service and labour histories, and Indigenous Living-Legacy/ Memory Story archiving innovations for our time. Her words have been installed and projected in mixed- media exhibitions, including creative-arts research collaboration with Unbound Collective. She is widely published, and her manuscripts include Dirty Words, Cordite Books, 2015, Archival-poetics, Vagabond Press, 2019, and APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA, Wakefield Press, in-press, 2021.