Useful Arts, 2021
11 composite digital images, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2021

This brittle light
Light Source commissions 2020-2021
Curated by Melissa Keys

Throughout the past twelve months of pandemic disruption, Buxton Contemporary commissioned an array of leading Australian artists to develop a series of new projects, under the title of Light Source commissions. Referencing art as a source of illumination the initiative was conceived to support the creation of new work or the further development of an existing landmark body of work.

Useful Arts, takes its name from a chapter in an historical anthropological text, Both Sides of Buka Passage: An Ethnographic Study of Social, Sexual and Economic Questions in the North-Western Solomon Islands, published in 1935 and authored by British anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood.

Useful Arts comprises a series of composite digital images. Redrawn and recoloured photographic images of objects and often unseen museum storerooms of ethnographic collections and repositories around the world.

The second part of Useful Arts comprises an installation that replicates a museum storeroom, presented in Buxton Contemporary’s gallery spaces. Within this environment, the artist presents a selection of Kastom (traditional culture) objects from her collection in an act of cultural agency that raises critical questions around notions of ownership, repatriation, the politics of display, the history of classification and the moral imperative for colonial redress.