Living Songlines symposium. National Museum of Australia. Friday, February 23, 9am to 5pm. $45 adults concessions and Friends full members. Bookings essential. nma.gov.au/whats-on/events/living-songlines-symposium#bc=hpt-symposium.
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Award-winning Australian filmmaker Lynette Wallworth will be one of the participants in a one-day symposium examining the impact and legacy of the National Museum of Australia's Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters exhibition.
Wallworth won the Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary Award at the 38th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards for her virtual reality film Collisions, which had screenings at the museum. At the symposium, she will be talking about another of her films, Always Walking Country: Parnngurr Yarrkalpa, being shown in Songlines, and about the process of collaboration between herself and female Martu artists from the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
Always Walking Country: Parnngurr Yarrkalpa was made for the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart but is now part of the National Museum's collection along with the painting whose creation it documents, Hunting Ground.
"I filmed the women painting a large canvas that's part of the Songlines exhibition," Wallworth says. During the long days the women worked on Hunting Ground, she would film some sections a frame at a time periodically as well as edit the material gathered to capture the process of creation as the imagery was built up layer by layer and the creators worked, ate and even slept on the canvas.
"It became like this lived entity."
The film, Wallworth says, documents the intensity of the creative process as the women transform the canvas into a finished work with their gradually applied layers of paint, many of which are invisible to the eye.
Wallworth has had a fruitful collaboration with the Martu people but she was initially reluctant to go there despite being invited by them as they had seen and liked some of her earlier work.
"I was worried about how I would respond ...and not knowing what I could create in the amount of time I had."
As it turned out, she needn't have worried - all concerned were happy with the result.
She's looking forward to coming to Canberra and not just for the symposium.
"I'm happy because I haven't seen the exhibition yet - I've heard wonderful things," Wallworth says.
