Dialogue with my ancestor
Vanderbilt University Museum of Art · 2026
Scent: Connection, Confrontation, Memory, curated by Dr. Susan Dine and Dr. Rachel P. Kreiter, brought together artists from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds to explore how smell can evoke memory, place, relationships, and lived experience. Through installation, photography, sculpture, painting, and performance, the exhibition considered how something invisible and ephemeral can become a powerful way of connecting with the world around us.
For this exhibition, I created a new performance and installation rooted in an Ainu understanding of the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds. I explored ideas of home, nature, cultural memory, and ancestral presence through movement, original music, imagery, and materials associated with the Ainu cise (home).
The work emerged from a personal reflection on belonging: how a sense of home can remain with us even when we are physically far from the places and people that shaped us. Through the installation and performance, I brought together memory, sensory experience, and Ainu cultural perspectives to create a space where the past and present could meet.
Photo©️Susan Dine
Maree Clarke is a Mutti Mutti/Wemba Wemba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung artist whose practice revitalises Ancestral knowledge through cultural materials, archives, and contemporary art. For Scent, Maree generously provided her microscopic images of river reeds, creating a meaningful connection between Aboriginal and Ainu relationships to land, material, memory, and home.
Reed Images © Maree Clarke
