Aboriginal Design and Spatial Considerations

This panel brings together leading Aboriginal designers and thinkers to discuss the theory and application of Aboriginal design and spatial considerations. Featuring Daniele Hromek (Budawang/Yuin), Amy Tracey (Wiradjuri) and Cassie Willis (Ngemba/Yuwaalaraay) in conversation with Jonathan Jones (Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi).

Amy Tracey is a Wiradjuri woman who grew up in far northwest New South Wales. She is a floral artist, textiles designer and creator of design label Flannel Billy. Amy has always felt a strong pull to the land around her, feeling no more at home then when surrounded by wide open plains and flowering gum trees. After graduating from a Bachelor of Design in Fashion and Textiles at the University of Technology Sydney, Amy began studying and practicing floristry, which allowed her to be surrounded by Australia's nature on a more regular basis.

Cassie Willis is a Ngemba/Yuwaalaraay woman from Brewarrina NSW who grew up on Dharawal Land in the Illawarra and currently lives on Gadigal Land. Cassie is studying Visual Communication at the University of Technology Sydney and is interested in how visual communication and graphic design can be used as a voice for Aboriginal people. There have been a lot of visual stories told about Aboriginal people and Cassie’s aim is to join with others to re-tell or make visible counter-narratives to those traditionally dominant visual voices, as well as to help tell some totally new visual stories that celebrate Aboriginal people, history and culture.

An associate lecturer at UTS's School of Design, Daniele Hromek is also a spatial designer and artist, fusing design elements with installations and sculptural form. Her work often considers the urban Aboriginal condition, the Indigenous experience of Country and contemporary Indigenous identities. As a researcher, she is considering how to decolonise and Indigenise the curricula by creating spaces to substantially affect Indigenous rights and culture within the institution of the university.

Her research contributes an understanding of the Indigenous experience and comprehension of space, and investigates how Aboriginal people occupy, use, narrate, sense, Dream and contest their space. It considers the traumas affected to land, places, spaces and, by extension, to Indigenous peoples by the consequences of invasion and colonisation. It questions how, through decolonisation, space can be re-Indigenised, and rethinks the 'values' that inform Aboriginal understandings of space through Indigenous spatial knowledge. It offers a reconstruction, reinterpretation, retranslation and reclamation of Aboriginal experiences of space, in doing so considering the sustainability of Indigenous cultures from a spatial perspective.

Daniele is a proud Saltwater woman, born on Gadigal lands, brought up in Bundjalung region, with ancestral roots in the Budawang tribe of the Yuin nation.