Making & Belonging

I visited the British Museum recently to see the exhibition on Aboriginal baskets, or dillybags as we sometimes call them. I spent some time working amongst Aboriginal communities up in far north Queensland and near Darwin in the late 1990's, and I have always felt an affinity with their culture, their crafts and their sense of disempowerment amongst a dominant, alien culture.

The water carrier, seen above, is one of the most beautiful objects I have seen - not only is it expertly constructed with what looks like one piece of sea kelp, but the idea that as humans we used to have to carry water, often long distances and to have to treat it as such a valuable resource, is difficult to actually comprehend until you see what a water carrier looks like - you can imagine holding it, what the kelp feels like, how long someone would have had to carry it for each trip to the water hole.

The baskets were also so joyous to see, the colours from natural plant dyes, the shapes and textures of the weaving and threading and the ingenuity with scarce material resources. But, what I had forgotten about with these bags was their power - as objects in themselves but also as carriers of symbolic meaning.

As the curator writes in the catalogue, "Aboriginal people ...were mostly mobile, moving from place to place within their territories. They made and used comparatively few objects: their riches were and still are intellectual, philosophical and religious".

It is this notion of these baskets being carriers of such rich cultural meaning that I am awed by. From what I understand, they were made by one person, but within a community of others, and amongst the ecology of their own land, that they have inherited. It is this collective making and use that makes them so powerful.

"The baskets hold our families, our stories, our knowledge, our language, our law and even our men's and women's power...for us the basket is a symbol of the things that we have, that we know and that we can share".

I will ponder more on the idea of 'collective making' in my next post on the Power of Making exhibition I saw at the V & A last week.