INDIGENOUS PRINTMAKING

FOR MANY INDIGENOUS ARTISTS, printmaking is, at least initially, a completely alien idea.” Thus wrote ANU Professor Sasha Grishin in a Canberra Times review of a 2016 exhibition of mainly Aboriginal prints – Etched in the Sun II – at the Nancy Sever Gallery in the capital.

In 2008, Etched in the Sun I had been held at the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery, so there are plenty of such ‘alien’ prints around today. What’s more, there’s a logical reason why Canberra should be an appropriate home for showing work that is made by artists from the distant deserts, Arnhem Land, The Kimberley and Far North Queensland.

The record books show that the first remote Aboriginal art prints were sponsored by the Catholic Bishop of Darwin, John O’Loughlin in 1969, inspired by seeing Inuit printmaking in Canada. He persuaded the artist Madeleine Clear to start a workshop on the Tiwi Islands (north