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This paper examines the different forms of indigenous agency embodied in a museum collection and identifies personal relationships as a constructive platform from which to understand objects in collections of material culture. Specifically, it describes the results of a field investigation to gather Balinese responses to the Forge Collection of Balinese Art at the Australian Museum. This approach reflects the broadening vision in museum practice and scholarship over the last decades, recognising that most museum institutions describe themselves as the custodians or guardians of collections and seek to engage with the indigenous communities that produced them. Most people in the village of Kamasan in East Bali, Indonesia, have recollections of the late collector and anthropologist Anthony Forge, given that only 40 years has passed since he lived in the village with his family. This paper relates some general responses to his collecting project before considering the complex and productive relationship between Forge and the artist Mangku Mura. Not only is it apparent that the relationship between artist and anthropologist– collector had implications for the material form of art produced in the village, and subsequently housed in the museum collection, it shows that traditional artists produce their art in defiance of conventional understandings of ‘traditional’ art. While this paper is an occasion to reflect on the applicability of a particular field methodology and approach to other cultural collections, it also points to the wider implications for interpreting ‘traditional’ practices by opening up to debate ideas about timelessness and originality in the context of changing social relations. A broadening vision in museum practice and scholarship in recent decades has led museums around the world to re-envisage their mission as the custodians of collections in their care. Along with this has come greater acknowledgement of the agency of indigenous people in the process of making museum collections. This paper describes one attempt to engage with a community of Balinese artists in relation to a collection of Balinese paintings housed at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Initially collected during the 1970s by the English anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929–1991), the return of the museum ‘archive’ to the village of Kamasan highlights the reciprocal ways in which relationships between artists and anthropologists work. Given that only 40 years have passed since Forge conducted his research in the village, most people in Kamasan still remember the collector. Their responses generated new perspectives on the impact of Forge’s collecting and research on the people with whom he worked and on the trajectory of Kamasan art. In addition to describing the ways that Forge is craft + design enquiry 184 remembered, this paper examines collaboration in terms of the role that Forge played in the career of the artist Mangku Mura (1920–1999) and the critical role that Mangku Mura played in interpreting the art that Forge collected. The Australian Museum houses a major collection of more than 200 Balinese paintings collected by Forge. The anthropologist, from whom the Forge Collection takes its name, became chair of the newly established Department of Prehistory and Anthropology at The Australian National University in 1974. Immediately prior to his Canberra appointment, Forge spent a year doing fieldwork in the village of Kamasan in Bali. His selection of Bali as a field site was partly motivated by a desire to extend his comparative perspective beyond the insights he had gained during previous fieldwork amongst the Abelam in New Guinea (Forge 1966, 1973). From October 1972 to September 1973 Forge purchased 104 of the paintings now in the Australian Museum collection; he made shorter fieldwork visits in 1977, 1979 and 1986. Forge purchased a combination of old paintings, some that had belonged to temples or family collections, and new works by living artists. Although few twentieth-century anthropologists paid serious attention to material culture, Forge belongs to a small group who produced well-documented collections in the course of their research (Campbell 2014). Even though Forge was not under commission to make the initial collection, buying art was always an explicit part of his field investigations. The Australian Museum did not become involved with his collecting project until 1975, when Forge offered his collection of paintings for sale. After acquiring his initial collection, part of which was exhibited at the Australian Museum in 1978, and commissioning a further collecting trip in 1979, little interest was shown in the collection until 2009, when I was offered the chance to conduct research on the Forge Collection.1 By this time, the practice of collecting material culture by anthropologists was subject to higher levels of scrutiny than four decades ago, when Forge assembled the collection. This is not to say that Forge was unmindful of the ethics of collecting or the implications of buying art while working in Kamasan, rather that, in today’s museum environment, collection interpretative strategies are now informed by the principle of intercultural exchange. In fact, Laura Peers and Alison Brown (2003) identify attempts to engage with ‘source communities’ as one of the most important developments in the history of museums.2 From July 2010 – April 2011 and September–December 2011 I conducted fieldwork in Kamasan to investigate local appraisals of Forge as a collector and to gather new insights about the paintings he collected. Visual material was a key component of my 1 The research was made possible with a postgraduate scholarship funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Project between the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, ‘Understanding Balinese painting: collections, narratives, aesthetics and society’. 2 The term ‘source communities’ refers to: ‘groups in the past when artefacts were collected, as well as to their descendants today. These terms have most often been used to refer to indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Pacific, but apply to every cultural group from whom museums have collected: local people, diaspora, and immigrant communities, religious groups, settlers, and indigenous peoples’ (Peers & Brown 2003: 2). Craft and the archive: Museum collections and memory in a Balinese village 185 research. I took photographs of all the paintings in the Forge Collection, as well as images of people and places that Forge had photographed. This methodology has been used by others to draw out stories about collector identities and collected objects.3 Formally, the process is known as visual repatriation or photoelicitation, and is described as a way to understand ‘the differing perspectives and interpretations that source communities have of history and knowledge, and of their methods of narrating this information’ (Dudding 2005: 218). Following Rodney Harrison et al. (2013: 4), in the ensuing discussion this paper attempts to go ‘beyond the observation that indigenous people and ethnographic objects had (and continue to have) agency’ to consider the broader implications of such agency. This is preceded by a brief introduction to the visual art of Kamasan, leading to an explanation of why this kind of art has often been regarded by Western observers as belonging to the condition of craft. While such categories are not really pertinent to Kamasan understandings of art, and say more about ethnocentric bias in the minds of foreign observers, the examples cited throughout this paper show that Kamasan artists produce works with unique characteristics and individual histories of articulation. While these qualities might support the contention that paintings fit a category of fine art, there is considerable scope to rethink how notions of skill and individuality are conceived in relation to the way Balinese artists work.