I have 3 fantastic speakers during the festival:
Sunday May 20th, 7.30pm -
Professor Sam Smiles, Emeritus Professor of Art History at Plymouth University and Tate Research Fellow will be speaking on ‘Light on the Land – 200 years of painting Australia, looking at the artists’ responses to the Australian landscape, offering a general survey of that history from the First Fleet onwards, but concentrating particularly on the idea of Australian nationhood from the end of the 19c and the more recent realisation that Aboriginal understandings of the land needed to be incorporated, too.
Professor Smiles recently curated the hugely successful ‘Into the Light’ exhibition at the newly re-opened RAMM museum in Exeter. Tickets are going fast – £3, booking essential through www.naomihart.info or 07763 148619
Thursday May 24th, 7.30pm -
Dr Jenny Pickerill, Reader in Environmental Geography at Leicester University (http://www.jennypickerill.info/) will be speaking on ‘Why should we care? Australian Indigenous Environmental politics’. Land is a fundamental part of Australian Aboriginal culture and art and the Kimberley region of Australia is facing huge changes with a proposed Gas plant just north of Broome. Jenny interviewed many of the key players in the local environmental groups and her work looks at alternatives to mining and gas exploration for the Australian economy.
Saturday May 26th, 7.30pm -
Film ‘Jila – painted waters of the Great Sandy Desert’ about the giant communal canvas painted by artists of the Great Sandy Desert as part of their Native Title Claim for their ancestral land to the Australian Government. Stunning images and moving interviews, followed by
Jane Pedersen, of Bristol University, speaking on ‘Living Waters – Australia through the eyes of the artists’. Jane has lived and worked in North Western Australia and has intimate links with the artists and people of the region. In summer 2011 she worked in Broome as a research assistant, on a Cultural Management Plan, with the Aboriginal corporation, ‘Nyamba Buru Yawuru’ (NBY) (This is Yawuru Country).