Visual art / Maree Clarke: Seeing the Invisible. At Canberra Museum and Gallery, until November 23. Reviewed by SOPHIA HALLOWAY.

Melbourne-based multi-disciplinary artist Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta, Wamba Wamba, Mutti Mutti and Boonwurrung woman.

Over the course of her 30-year practice, Clarke has become known for her reclamation of Aboriginal material culture, incorporating kangaroo teeth, river reeds, possum skins and other materials into her works.

Seeing the Invisible at Canberra Museum and Gallery is a small collection of works made by Clarke in response to an 1862 river reed necklace that features in another of CMAG’s exhibitions, Canberra/Kamberri, Place & People.

The necklace was a wedding gift to Minna Close Palmer, of Palmerville Estate at Ginninderra, by Ngunnawal leader Noolop. The necklace is believed to represent the friendship between Palmer and the Aboriginal women she had grown up with. The reeds from the waterways of Ginninderra which had been used to make the necklace had since disappeared from the region due to the impacts of cattle and sheep grazing.

More recently, careful tending by First Nations Rangers has seen the reeds return to Ginninderra, where Clarke spent time on Country in preparation for this exhibition. Clarke’s time in Ginninderra produced six works – five necklaces, and a video work.

The necklaces are supersized, many times greater in scale than their 1862 counterpart. For Clarke, the scale conveys the cultural significance of such objects, but also the magnitude of the losses of land, language and culture that First Nations people have experienced since colonisation.

The scale also serves to highlight the sculptural quality of these necklaces, formed in various combinations of river reeds, glass beads and feathers.

The viewer will be grateful for the scale on account of the less-than-ideal exhibition space. Seeing the Invisible is installed in a glass-walled room adjacent to CMAG and along the walkway to Civic Square.

The space cannot be entered, and instead the viewer peers in from some distance. Clarke’s oversized works might lend themselves better to this space than smaller works, but still, the intricate detail of the feathers and glass seed pods beg for closer inspection which simply isn’t possible here. It’s an awkward space that isn’t altogether suitable as an exhibition space, but Clarke’s works hold their own.

The video work, Seeing the Invisible, intersperses microscopic images of river reeds with footage of people on Country, collecting river reeds. The way Clarke plays with scale, supersized to microscopic, invites further interpretation but isn’t directly addressed in the exhibition text. If the oversized necklaces speak to the significance and immense loss of Country and culture, does the microscopic speak to society’s refusal to bear witness to its damaging effects? Is this damage truly invisible, or wilfully unseen?

The beauty of Clarke’s works remind us of the incredible resilience of culture and the environment despite these losses. The seemingly invisible is writ large, so that we can’t look away.