For almost 40 years, Keerray Woorroong Gunditjmara woman Vicki Couzens has worked in the Aboriginal community, profoundly changing the cultural landscape around her.
In 1999, Couzens attended a workshop at Melbourne Museum and encountered the Lake Condah possum skin cloak. After this experience, and along with others, Couzens set about revitalising the practice of creating the cloaks, culminating in their appearance at the 2006 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony—and being exhibited at galleries Australia-wide. It’s just one example of how Couzens reclaims Aboriginal cultural practices and knowledges.
Couzens has sat on various organisation boards, is undertaking a PhD in language revitalisation, and also creates “artworks”—although this term is contested in our interview. Ahead of Couzens’s sound and image installation for nightshifts at Buxton Contemporary, created with Robert Bundle, we talk about lifelong learning, the importance of listening, and what propels Couzens’s tireless work in creating moments of knowledge sharing.
“Nothing in our culture is siloed to a department or sector: art is part of life.”
— VICKI COUZENS
TIARNEY MIEKUS
I know that your preferred description of your practice is “creative cultural expression” rather than “artist”. Can you unpack why that’s a better fit?
VICKI COUZENS
Creative cultural expression covers the spectrum of what I do, and it’s more accurate in terms of what the definition of “artist” might put in people’s minds. Like, “Oh, that’s a person who makes art and is part of the art
