The ceramic work of Silvia Stansfield draws on the cultural legacy of South America. Discussion of the work of this artist with good colour photographs.
Cultural diversity is crucial. Film makers may be unlike (in terms of cultural background) but they are also alike (in terms of their value.) In the area of independent film, there are a number of films which deal with multicultural themes and/or give non Anglo film-makers the opportunity to express themselves. One hopes that mainstream film can take up on this lead, because, from all apparent evidence, it remains sorely imbalanced.
A great deal of agonising has gone on since the 1988 Bicentenary about the nature of Australian identity and therefore the nature of our distinctive culture.
One of the leading debates in Cultural Studies around the world deals with the issues of cultural difference or ethnicity in relation to concepts of a national culture.
The alphabet was invented, so they say, in Lebanon. To some Lebanese, their country represents an un-broken link with the birth of human history. Non-Aboriginal Australians, by contrast, share stories of interrupted family ties, of exile and forgetting. How then do these Lebanese relate to life in Australia?
Reflections on an exhibition of abstract art at Linden Gallery St Kilda, Melbourne March 1991. An emigrant artists once said to me "I can never abandon the figure and make purely abstract art, after all I am Greek".
With the exception of some programming on SBS and the ABC, artists receive very little exposure on television. The limitations of television, the need to maintain a wide audience reach, the difficult question of what is 'good art' in a televisual sense, all may help to explain the absence of living artists from this, the most powerful of all media.