Image courtesy of Silver Salt Photography.
Carmen Glynn-Braun
Carmen Glynn-Braun, born in Alice Springs now based in Sydney, is an emerging Indigenous Australian artist stemming from the Southern Arrernte, Kaytetye, and Ammatyerre nations across Central Australia. Glynn-Braun recently completed her honours year at UNSW Art and Design, and majored in Painting and Sculpture. However, delves in many mediums within her practise taking a trans disciplinary approach to each work, matching the aesthetic (and material) accordingly to the narrative. Glynn-Braun’s works are almost always based on true events, Indigenous life experience and both written and oral Aboriginal histories. Glynn-Braun’s work this past year predominantly explores lived experiences of Aboriginal women past and present, translated through gentle and experimental approaches to materials and form. She is vocal in her belief that the survival and resilience of Aboriginal people makes for compelling and important subject matter and deserves a celebratory and respected platform within the arts (one that is well overdue).
Tell us about your creative process. What drives your practice?
Much of my work revolves around telling stories about Indigenous female experience. I’m interested in multi-generational stories and how those experiences co-exist today. I really just treat my all my works like visual essays; they’re always heavily researched, factual, and are direct family stories or based on real life events. I offer them as platforms for education and Indigenous story preservation through the lens of my generation. My mother is a documentary filmmaker, spending a good majority of her career recording important Indigenous narratives. So I spent a lot my childhood on doco film sets and in editing rooms, this gave me a super solid understanding about the importance of recording our oral histories and how to respectfully represent and safeguard them. So I guess art is my way of doing that.
How does your identity as an indigenous woman influence your conceptual and material approach to art making?
Well for a start, preservation of our stories via art is a pivotal part of our culture/history as first nations people - we’ve been educating through various art forms for thousands of years. It’s a significant part of who we are and how we uphold and pass on knowledge generationally. So, it feels natural for me to tell my yarns; my way through creative platforms.
In terms of concept and material choice, I just find a narrative I’m interested in first, usually one that I feel needs and deserves to be shared, and then from there choose appropriate materials through experimentation. I always find myself at the mercy of the concept materially, which can get tricky at times but I’m okay with that. I think being completely open to the end look of the finished product to be a good recipe for strong work.
How does printmaking fit into your experimental processes?
I’m only new to the printmaking world. I have a painting and sculpture background and have been experimenting with printmaking [namely screenprinting] the past year or so. It’s been a great process because many of the stories I tell can hold heavy and dark political themes and I’ve found printmaking to be a beautiful method to ‘gently’ allow certain images to come through without making it too literal or intense. So in short I use it more like a branding method to create a subtle 3D type effect within an already established painting. So really taking a cross-disciplinary approach, combining both painting and printmaking. It works extremely well I think.
Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?
I’m currently doing an emerging artist fellowship with the Australia Museum, which allows me the opportunity to research within both their displayed and hidden collections at the museum. A very unique opportunity, I’m hoping to develop a series of work from this over the next 6 months.
