Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung artist and curator, Maree Clarke has worked alongside Canberra Glassworks on several projects since 2018.

Known for her open and collaborative approach to cultural practice, Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices. Over the past thirty years, she consistently works in intergenerational collaboration to revive dormant Southeastern Aboriginal cultural material objects, including possum skin cloaks, kangaroo teeth necklaces, and river reed necklaces.

Maree Clarke has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and in 2021 she was the subject of a major survey exhibition Maree Clarke – Ancestral Memories at the National Gallery of Victoria. Other recent exhibitions include Echoes Unveiled, Artizon Museum, Tokyo (2o25), Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2021), The National, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2021), Reversible Destiny, Tokyo Photographic Museum, Tokyo Japan (2021) and the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary Art Prize, for which she was awarded the Victorian Artist award. In 2020 she was awarded the Linewide Commission for the Metro Tunnel project (current) and is the recipient of the 2020 Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fellowship.

Maree Clarke presents a group of newly made supersized scale Reed Necklaces made with the Glassworks as part of her solo show with Canberra Museum and Gallery. Their giant size pays tribute to the cultural strength that the original object holds, compelling us to notice its beauty and the power of its story, and to also acknowledge the scale of the loss felt by her people.

Clarke’s research into the history of these objects has seen her travel extensively nationally and internationally to research and investigate holdings of cultural materials in institutional and private collections. With this background, Clarke was invited to visit Canberra and spend time on Country with the Ginninderry reed necklace that was made in 1862 by Aboriginal girls and gifted to Emma Minnie Palmer on the eve of her wedding. The necklace is now on display in the Canberra /Kamberri exhibition on loan from Catherine Palmer.

Yawa (Long Journey) is a public artwork consisting of thirty Murrini glass panels, shaped to form a stunning 5 metre glass canoe suspended overhead in the Berninneit Grand Hall. Patination on the glass captures the microscopic elements of the river reed and reflects the play of light and colour of the wetlands and ocean that surround Millowl Phillip Island.

The artwork has strong cultural resonance and is inspired by waterways and wetlands, river reeds and long journeys. Maree is deeply committed to the revival of south-eastern Aboriginal art and this project is part of that revival process. The project is called ‘Yawa’ which means ‘long journey’ in Boon Wurrung language.

Over 300 community members contributed to the creation of the glass, during public workshops led by Maree Clarke and three generations of her family, Kerri Clarke, Wade Mahoney, Mitch Mahoney, Molly Mahoney and baby Yarran Clarke-Mahoney, at Berninneit in January and February 2025. orking in small groups, participants arranged patterns of coloured glass into panels that will ultimately form the body of the canoe.

We had a school group through last week and more booked in next term – it’s a great work to talk to kids about! Lots of excitement. The opening was a real treat, as was working with you all. Thanks so much for the calm professionalism and beautiful outcome. Regards to the Glassworks team and Sean Booth, the frame is getting many compliments! Maree and family were so pleased with the final outcome, as were many of the community participants who came along to the launch. The mayor lay down on the floor to get a fulsome view.

– Rosemary Forde, Visual Arts and Cultural Development Manager at Bass Coast City Council

When the workshop was over, it was all hands-on deck as the glass panels were carefully packed up in readiness to be sent up to the glassworks in Canberra. There, they will be fired at a high temperature and the individual glass pieces of coloured glass will melt into one. While still hot, the panels will be curved and shaped into the body of the canoe, and holes drilled into their corners, ready for the wires that will suspend it.

In a few months’ time, it will be ready. We will come together again to celebrate the canoe’s new home at Berninneit, our community gathering place. It will catch the afternoon light from the west, revealing the colourful patterns of river reeds and dappled waterways. It will reflect back to us what we have co-created, who we are as a community and the special Country on which we live.

– Laura Brearley, journalist for the Bass Coast Post

In the Flicker of Light is a new series in glass by internationally-renowned First Nations artist, Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wamba Wamba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung) for Vivian Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.

This series is the artist’s most ambitious glass project to date with work developed through a culmination of residencies across the State of Washington, USA and Canberra, Australia. This unparalleled exhibition is an in-depth exploration of the medium of glass and its seemingly endless possibilities in re-thinking and re-presenting cultural materials and objects in transfixing new ways.

Maree Clarke recieved the esteemed $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture in 2023 to facilitate the production of the hero work for this exhibition – a 3 metre-long canoe comprised of 20 suspended glass sections patterned with microscopic river reeds in Murrini glass.

These beautiful sculptural objects speak of the fragility of Indigenous knowledge and ways of being and of the extraordinary power and resilience of First Nations culture. Like the chimerical nature of glass, Clarke remains open and receptive to a kind of imaginative shapeshifting within her work, and it is from this ability and practice that she so ably facilitates a continuation of cultural stories and memory.

In ‘In the flicker of light’, Clarke concentrates entirely on this [glass] medium – calling upon the extraordinary depth of knowledge developed through her years of studying historical cultural material in museum collections and archives to envisage a new body of work that recreates cultural artefacts in glass. 

– Kelly Gellatly, arts writer and exhibition essay author