Saturday 10 September -  Sunday 30 October 2022 | Main Gallery

For First Nations people, land is everything. It is mother, lore and sustenance – it is the point of human belonging. The exhibition, Land Marks offers an insight into this world view through ancestral creation stories which situate the individual in place and in relationship to each other.

The focus art medium of this exhibition - Printmaking - was first introduced into remote Aboriginal communities in the 1960s by school teachers, craft advisors and visiting non-Indigenous artists. Early experimentation included wood and lino cuts and fabric printing. Subject matter largely depicted animals and human forms and increasingly included aspects of creation stories, totemic design and iconography.

The development and spread of Aboriginal Art Centres in remote communities through the 1970s and 1980s led to an expansion of artmaking practices with the dual purpose of maintaining and disseminating culture through art, while providing an important revenue stream for communities. Printmaking took off in some of these centres under the influence and guidance of arts advisors, some of whom brought with them skills and techniques gained from working in print and poster making organisations of the metropolitan centres.  

Over time, leading artists worked with Master printmakers in metropolitan print studios such as Canberra School of Art and also in equipped art centres on country, such as Merrepen Arts in Daly River and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka inYirrkala. In these settings, skills rapidly developed enabling the production of a variety of print technologies including Lithographs, etchings, linocuts and screenprints – all of which are explored in this exhibition.