Kurrwa (stone tool/axehead) to Kartak (container, cup, billycan, pannikin): hand-made/held-ground. An enduring, collaborative, practice-led research journey representing a distinct Australian First Nations Storying/Storywork and First Nations Performative Autoethnography as subalter/N/ative archive and methodology – created from the rememorying, re/imagined standpoint of a Gurindji | Malngin | Mudburra | Anglo-Australian | Chinese | German | Irish woman

Abstract

Can a visual arts-Gurindji-specific culturally based, creative-led framework comprising collaborative exhibition and performative thesis, develop and present a Gurindji-specific storying of dispossession, cultural reclamation, transmission and exchange through dislocated kinship connections; and if so, how? What does a Gurindji-specific framework look like conceptually, creatively, critically? What does it do to and for history, to theory, to cultural analysis? Is this framework relevant and if so, for whom? This exegesis is a practice-led analysis drawing upon key cultural events and sites, and the involvement and displacement associated with singular and shared Gurindji ‘experience, location and visuality’. As a critical exploration, it radically inverts the limited recognition of what it is to be, do and enact as a Gurindji community member.My research takes shape from the diverse standpoints of descendants living on/in traditional homelands, and from members of the significant Gurindji displaced community. It is conducted through methodologies of critical First Nations Performative Autoethnography, First Nations Storying/Storywork (creative narratives), and what I call “cultural archaeology”. My mode of analysis engages with experimental, intra- and intercultural First Nations aesthetics and embodied action.