Contemporary Indigenous Textiles was the first exhibition in Australia to present a comprehensive range of diverse images and approaches to design being explored by Indigenous artists across the north of Australia.

This exhibition forms part of the Cairns Art Gallery online First Nations Research Archive developed as part of the Gallery’s online Legacy Archive produced to celebrate the Gallery’s 30th anniversary.

Community-led Aboriginal Art Centres in the Northern Territory first explored screen-printed textiles as a new creative medium in the 1960s. Today, Art Centres in Far North Queensland are also working in this medium, and textiles from across the top end of Australia are receiving national and international acclaim as a form of cultural expression that provides sustainable economic, cultural, and social benefits to Indigenous artists, art centres and their communities.

Indigenous textile screen-printing is a dynamic art form that transcends the realm of simple utilitarianism. It inhabits a previously undefined space between the commonplace and the sacred. As a creative medium, it brings together elements of art, design, fashion and craft, resulting in a unique art form that is accessible, adaptive and reproducible.

Indigenous artists who live and work in remote communities deploy a range of media including three-dimensional woven or carved objects, and two-dimensional works on bark, canvas, paper, and cloth. When working in textiles, these artists often impart the same strong cultural content and spirituality to cloth as they do to other more highly priced and celebrated artforms. The materiality and physical qualities of cloth also provides artists with accessible pathways to share storylines about ancestral beings and country, identity, material culture, and life forms that include bush foods, animals, birds and marine life.

This exhibition revealed the specialised processes of developing design concepts through to production, and showed how the aesthetic, cultural, and commercial significance of Indigenous screen-printed textiles contributes to the strength and sustainability of community enterprises in remote parts northern Australia. 

This exhibition is a curatorial collaboration between the Gallery, Bobbie Ruben, mentor and design support in Indigenous textile development, and participating arts centres and artists.

IMAGE: Rowena Morgan, My Grandmothers Country  2016, Screen print on linen, Courtesy of Nagula Jarndu, Photo: Bobbie Ruben