Collected Reflections

Abstract

This article offers four reflective commentaries on Interpretive Wonderings*, an intercultural community engagement, art and exhibition project. It consists of three interrelated events: the Mapping Culpra Station Workshop, the Interpretive Wonderings exhibition and the Migratory Wonderings exhibition. All were shaped by the coming together of community and creative practitioners on the land of Culpra Station, New South Wales, Australia, in order to work beside local Aboriginal people to learn and share, and to generate creative responses from this experience. The four personal reflections included in this compilation offer multiple perspectives on the Interpretive Wonderings project and draw on the four project leaders’ roles as well as various disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. They include a collaborator’s indigenous viewpoint, transformational experiences that brought about a different understanding of landscape, and observations on the project’s curatorial and exhibition processes and practices. *Editorial note: The Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio comprises a set of interrelated writings that attempt to provide a distinctive, multi‐perspectival account of this creative research project. In addition to this research piece, other articles include: a co‐authored contextual overview which situates the project in theoretical and practical terms (Drake et al. 2019a, this issue) and associated research‐led articles by Gilbert (2019, this issue) and Mehzoud (2019, this issue). Read individually, each designated article presents a focused inquiry (depth); taken together as a curated series, they provide the reader with the opportunity to gain a comprehensive overview (breadth) and appreciation of the project’s guiding aspirations, objectives and outcomes that amounts to more than the sum of its discrete parts.

Curatorial Design at the Cultural Interface: Mapping Culpra Station

“…(Nb. These shifts are noted and unpacked in the four individualized self‐reflective accounts that have been collected into the article titled, Collected Reflections (Drake et al , this issue) , which is incorporated into the larger Interpretive Wonderings portfolio). Generally speaking however, through the work itself and through subsequent reflection, writing, discussion and presentation, it can be noted that a recognition, greater understanding and fore‐grounding of an Indigenous ontology through the concept of Country has permeated the work.…”