INDIGENOUS_Trace

Issue 45:2 | Wirltuti / Spring 2025

Guest Editors: Jessyca Hutchens (Palyku) and Zena Cumpston (Barkandji)

Guest edited by Jessyca Hutchens (Palyku) and Zena Cumpston (Barkandji), Trace explores practices which begin with what has been left behind — the echoes, residues, impressions and marks that give presence to the past. Rather than a focus on the historical or archival, such practices embody continuity and the cyclical. This issue began from conversations around printmaking practices which are inherently intermedial (connected to other forms of mark making) and for which trace can provide a potent material and conceptual metaphor. Against a continued discourse on Indigenous art and authenticity that centres direct marks made by the hand of the artist, we turn towards forms of repetition, iteration, mediation and of re-tracing the ancestral.

Cover image: Laurel Nannup, Grandad’s Visitors, 2021, etching, 57 x 57cm. Berndt Museum Collection. Courtesy and © the artist

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