Biography

Dr Ann Schilo is a senior lecturer in the School of Design and Art at Curtin University. Ann’s teaching and research concerns intersect in various fields and follow a number of key themes involved in the cultural analysis of creative practices, place and identity. She is particularly interested in the areas of women’s artistic practices, feminist art theories, the visualisation of place, and folk material culture. She is an experienced supervisor of Higher Degree by Research candidates, and recognised for her work in the area of creative production theses. Ann writes for many local and national journals and art catalogues.

Academic Paper

The shadow chaser: of colportage, printmaking and folk tales.
Ernst Bloch writes affectionately of colportage as a form of children’s literature that engages the reader in worlds of dreams, tales of derring do, and a thirst for adventure in far-away places. He suggests that colportage involves an interlacing of ideas that cross genres, styles and realities. Nadia Seremetakis, drawing upon the figure of the travelling book pedlar, adds another nuance to the concept by contending colportage is concerned with the circulation of things in everyday life; a traffic in signs and ideas from one culture to another in which the past and the present comingle. As such colportage can be understood as a montage of storytelling and travel, of dreams and desires, of former worlds and present realities wherein time and space collide.

Mobilising these considerations, in this paper I explore the work of Western Australian printmaker, Kati Thamo who draws inspiration from the stories, myths and tales that circulate through her own immigrant family history. Recently Thamo undertook a journey to her ancestor’s birthplace in Transylvania in search of traces of her family’s past. The resultant works envisage a palimpsest of the sense of adventure and dislocation of her travels layered with the traces of memories, family stories and folk tales. In chasing these shadows of personal histories, Thamo narrates a tale of identity in which everyday lives merge with folklore and fables to create images that locate the printmaker as colporteur, an explorer in the realm of ideas.