I recently spent a few days working on the Australia Challenge. There are so many gorgeous photos on flickr that it’s possible to lose quite a bit of time on there 🙂 I finally settled on a couple of photo sets from Arnhem Land and Kakadu for my inspiration. For this first piece, I was inspired by the photos with orange and red tones-the rock art, sunset, fire.
For this second piece I was inspired by a couple of photos from the Arnhem Land set with pale blue and red colours, particularly this photo of rock art.
The photographer, Jon Connell has lots of great photos from Australia on his photostream, if you get chance, do check them out.
My last piece was inspired by the Aboriginal Flag designed by artist Harold Thomas.
Harold Thomas was one of the Stolen Generations, taken from his parents at the age of 7. He won a scholarship to the South Australian School of Art and later worked at the South Australian Museum, the first aboriginal to be employed by a museum in Australia. He has been a campaigner for Aboriginal civil rights and land rights. If you don’t know about the stolen generations, Wikipedia has some information, and Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book ‘Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence’ is excellent. I should warn you that it’s heartbreaking.
Have you made anything for our Australia Challenge? If you have, we’d love to see it, join our Felting and Fiber forum or our flickr group to share it and anything else you’ve been working on. This is Lyn’s excellent piece.