Interrupting how we curate Aboriginal art through a PhD

Life after graduate research: Dr Jessica Clark

What happens when we curate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian art together? Dr Jessica Clark is a proud Palawa/Pallawah woman who took a leap to begin a career as a curator in Narrm/Melbourne. Her University of Melbourne PhD helped build her local and global network and figure out her place in the art world.

The VCA also gave her access to a range of galleries to research, experiment and take risks in exhibitions.

People were another reason Dr Clark chose the University of Melbourne. Her PhD supervisor Associate Professor David Sequiera had recently moved to the University.

“It was also really important to work with a First Nations supervisor for my PhD. I had met Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha, Nukunu) and knew she was over there too,” Dr Clark says.

A graduate research scholarship supported Dr Clark during her PhD.

“When you're an independent curator, it’s contract to contract,” Dr Clark says.

“The scholarship really helped take the pressure off the life stuff which ensured more time and space to dedicate to my research.”

Who’s Afraid of Aboriginal Art?

“Historically, exhibitions of Australian art have approached Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art as separate and operating in parallel to one another, rather than as interactive and interacting,” Dr Clark says.

Her PhD asked why.

“My approach to curating is multidimensional and very much guided by the process, the conversations with artists and between works of art.”

During her practice-led PhD, Dr Clark curated three exhibitions. Each explored a different approach to curating Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian art together.

Her exhibition one (&) another presented a series of 60 woven fibre baskets by Tjanpi Desert Weavers alongside a series of video works by Taree Mackenzie.

“The first exhibition was really focused on questioning and dismantling binaries and separations in the art world: between high and low art, between art and craft, between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian art,” Dr Clark says.

In and of this place is an ongoing online exhibition.

“For the second exhibition In and of this place, I developed a non-chronological and non-hierarchal online curatorial model in response to the Benalla Art Gallery Collection that featured a series of 12 artwork pairings,” Dr Clark says.

Each pairing included a historical Australian landscape painting from the Benalla Collection. They were presented alongside a contemporary work of art by an Aboriginal artist exploring lived experience and knowledge of Country.

“The third, titled breathing space, was a group-format exhibition that drew focus to each of the artist’s own unique relationships with materiality in relation to place, and conveyed Australian contemporary art as multidisciplinary, multidimensional, and as operating across and between cultures,” Dr Clark says.

Dr Clark’s thesis won a 2024 University of Melbourne Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in the PhD Thesis.

“The exhibitions disrupted standard institutional curatorial methods of approaching, viewing, and understanding Aboriginal art, and engaged a broader conversation about the curatorship of Australian art,” she says.

"The presence of First Nations voices in colonial museums and institutions is significant, and both a local and global curatorial conversation I am proud my research contributes to."

“It is a privilege to work with art and artists and collections across cultures, places and spaces, and to reconnect and reconsider ignored and forgotten histories and stories, from a multiplicity of perspectives,” Dr Clark says.

Institutions can help build connections to people

“The greatest resource and asset at the VCA are the people – the incredible artists and academics at the University that support students in their research. They make the place what it is,” Dr Clark says.

During her PhD, Dr Clark participated in the Graduate Assistantship Program, a career development and mentoring program offered through the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. Successful applicants receive a bursary, a casual academic employment contract, regular mentoring and a tailored development and training program.

“It was a real highlight, working closely with Professor Natalie King OAM to assist with her significant international exhibition projects and publications,” Dr Clark says.

“Natalie has been an incredible support and mentor to me – as well as my supervisors, my family and community, and I am very thankful for that.”

The Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development also supported Dr Clark throughout her PhD.

"It was great to have a space where you could go and make a cup of tea, to meet and yarn with Indigenous artists and graduate researchers, and the inspiring staff that work there," she says.

Find your feet in the art world with a PhD

“My vision is to expand the narrative of what’s possible with curatorship.”

Since finishing her PhD, Dr Clark has been working as a curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. She has also been working with Creative Victoria on the first ever Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair.

Dr Clark is also an Ursula Hoff Fellow, conducting research in the University of Melbourne and National Gallery of Victoria print collections.

“The PhD gave me the time, space and resources to develop critical thinking about my curatorship as an expressive practice,” Dr Clark says.

“Through the PhD, I now see myself as part of a bigger global conversation about contemporary art, curatorship and First Nations creative and cultural practice.”

Learn more about a PhD in Fine arts and Music