Gallery Talk with Basil Hall and Lisa Waup

Learn about the artworks in Shifting Ground and close to the wind from master printmaker Basil Hall and resident artist Lisa Waup.

Master printmaker Basil Hall has been working as a collaborating printer with Aboriginal artists since 1983. For 16 of these years, he was based in Darwin where he and a group of experienced printmakers made prints with many hundreds of artists from over 55 Art Centres in Central Australia, Arnhem Land, the Tiwi Islands and the Kimberley area of Western Australia. In 2001, Hall established the atelier Basil Hall Editions (BHE) to facilitate workshops in remote Indigenous communities across Australia and to work with many renowned independent artists. Over the past 22 years, BHE has produced more than 1,500 editions for 500 artists, which are held in collections around the world, including the National Gallery of Australia, the British Museum and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.

In 2023, Hall donated a collection of 1,316 prints by leading Indigenous Australian artists to Kluge-Ruhe. The gift is the largest single donation of artworks to UVA since John Kluge’s 1997 donation, which established Kluge-Ruhe as the only museum dedicated to Indigenous Australian art in the United States. The gift will help to establish Kluge-Ruhe as a center for study of Indigenous printmaking.

Lisa Waup is a mixed-cultural First Nations artist and curator from Narrm (Melbourne). Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses a diverse range of media including weaving, printmaking, photography, sculpture, fashion and digital art. With a deep connection to the symbolic power of materials, her work reflects her personal experiences, family history, Country and broader historical narratives. Waup holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the University of Melbourne and her work is held in both public and private collections in Australian and internationally. Currently Waup is a lecturer in the Drawing and Printmaking Department at the Victorian College of the Arts and the University of Melbourne.