An interview with Kent Wilson

Words by Jason Waterhouse

Artist, writer, curator and good mate, Kent Wilson's exhibition 'not dissimilar' is opening at Stockroom on the 8th June 2013.  

We had a chat about all things Kent.   

Kent Wilson, 'pollinate'

JW  - So in this interview I'm going to get straight to the point;  Kent Wilson you’re driving me nuts.  You have a show that opens in two weeks and you’re still making work, in fact you’re not even close to being finished (and I know this show is not your only yesterday deadline).  I can’t even begin to understand how you work like this.  It’s a polar opposite to how I operate. Can you please enlighten me as to how you’re not hemorrhaging with stress?

KW - Well, there's two aspects to this really. Firstly, I'm really just a very standard example of an emerging artist in contemporary Australia. In order to be an artist I juggle a variety of other part-time jobs and activities. All of these compete for my attention and keep me barely alive below the poverty line. But I simply cannot live without making art - it's a fundamental and insatiable need, not a choice. And I feel privileged and grateful to have the good fortune to be able to do what I do, so I'm generally of a positive and happy disposition. Even when I have 16 deadlines due in the one month.

Secondly, I am actually way more stressed than you would know from my calm demeanour. But some stress is a natural component of life and I don't like to hemorrhage it, as you say, because everyone else has their own stresses too and if I bleed my stress out into the atmosphere then that just infects the environment with additional negative vibes, soaking other people in my own issues.  I'm very aware that I'm really only a nodal point of interconnected relationships. The best I can do is manage the inflow and outflow of information, conjuring objects from materials at hand with as much deliberation as can be afforded at any given moment of the day. If there are good ideas driving the work, the art will make itself using you as an instrument.

Kent wanted to use this web sourced image of Rapunzel using a tool. I'm not sure why.

I should also point out that there are a few elements to this show: one is actually completed, one has commenced (and is looking killer!) and one is all planned out but not yet begun. And then there are periphery considerations of further works that may or may not make it in. None of this will make you any more relaxed about it. Such is the joy you signed on for as a gallery director, Jason. 

Next.

JW - Ok, I’m not convinced, but as always with you Kent I need to give the benefit of the doubt and trust that so far (against all probability) you have pulled each project off.  You’re clearly a genius, or a pure ass engineer, I will let the public decide.  

So tell the good public what to expect from this show that only partly exists, which opens on Thursday 6th June in TWO WEEKS time.

KW - Your caps lock, shift uppercase expression of the timeframe clearly reveals your own stress. Which in turn, makes me a little more stressed. You’re bleeding on me and now I'm stained.

Haha! This IS fun.

Also, thank you for the viscerally toned nomination of ass engineer. I notice that if I'm not a wanker, then I'm a skilled proctological craftsman. Either way, they are semi-viable Freudian references for the working machinations of an artist. Only semi-viable mind you.

And you're totally right allowing an audience to decide about the work. An artist can imbue an artwork with as much meaning as they like, but in the end the viewer decides the meaning. Always. Until anyone actually looks at art it is alway only ever partially complete.

Maybe I should just answer your damn question huh? In this show you will see the trace material elements of my thoughts on human beings grappling with their relationship to nature and nature's 'products'. In my estimation, humans are naked apes who pull stuff out of the ground, rip bits off of trees and concoct assemblages of these materials as extensions of their physical selves to interact with the world. Somehow we've become deluded into thinking these materials are separate from us and the world too is separate from us. But the cars we drive run on liquidised sunshine stored in ancient forest below the ground and computers function on bits of sand and melted rocks. Our instruments are us, and they are also the world itself. They are tools which we sometimes use as weapons and sometimes use for ceremony. In this show you'll see material expressions of these ideas.

Kent Wilson - work in progress

JW - The exploration of the balance between our living within, and pilfering of the planet we live on is a poignant and broad concept for an artist to explore.  And its a question not to be taken lightly, serious subject, in which its seriously hard to stay neutral (or at least leave the viewer to make their own mind).  As you know, I cant stand preachy art, and in this I am not alone.

So tell me about the title, 'not dissimilar'.  You’re not just making the same old hippy greenie shit I hope.

KW - That's really important to me actually. I don't like to make preachy art. I much prefer to be ambiguous and allow the viewer some freedom to determine their own meaning. If they want to. They can also just enjoy the shapes, the colours, the materials. That's fine too. I like art that is captivating visually, or sensorially, and if you're into it you also have an opportunity to find meanings and concepts lurking around like shadows.

But, you know, we do pilfer the planet. That's what we are. It's how we do it that often requires considered assessment. We will always reconfigure materials to suit certain ends. I do it in my art. Sometimes in my work I quite consciously choose plywood or pine plantation woods bought from large chain store, big box consumer churches of capitalism to reference our machinic approach to harvesting natural resources. We can't hate on ourselves, we can only adapt, evolve and make better choices.

The show is called not dissimilar because it reflects my approach to art making in general. It's not cool, or intellectually acceptable, to say that art is a metaphor. Some people think that's too easy a way to describe art. That's true, to a degree, but art IS a metaphor ... to a degree. All language is a code that attempts to translate an idea so that someone else can understand that idea. Art is a language too. A code of materials designed to translate ideas. The language (whether words or things) is the metaphor. These words you're reading aren't my ideas, they are symbols I punch on this keyboard in letters of a, t, e, r and so on. But when you read them, you reconstitute them into sounds and then you conjure the concepts into meaning in your head. Hopefully those concepts mirror the ideas I have in my head as closely as possible. Art is just another set of symbols.

The term not dissimilar is curious to me. If you think of an object, or an idea, you could say that on one end of a spectrum you have things that are similar to it. Down the other end of the spectrum you have things that are dissimilar (not similar) to it. But then there is a zone of things that are not the same, but also not not the same. These things are not dissimilar. It's a quirk of language, a double negative, but it lives in an ambiguous zone of relation. In this show there are a selection of artworks that I hope live in that ambiguous zone of relation. Both to each other, and also to the things they reference.

Kent Wilson - flag detail

So for example, I have had some flags made. They're made exactly the same way as national flags are made - by a company who specialises in making them, using the same dimensions, the same style and the same colours. There's four flags and they look for all intents and purposes as flags of African or Caribbean countries (this was unintended, but welcomed). They are not the same as national flags, but they're also ... not dissimilar. I'm also making some sculptures that look like javelins or spears. The same principle applies with them. But also, the javelins are not dissimilar to the flags. This is where it gets interesting to me. The way artworks begin to have relations with each other. Everything is networked.

JW - Over coffee at Stockroom I have had some very passionate debates over the concept of originality. In black and white terms, I sit it the cynical (surprise, surprise) there is no purely original idea camp. Does this mean your pitching a tent next door to me?  No Greys in this answer Mr Wilson.

KW - Well, sorry Jason, I'm afraid I'm camping elsewhere. There are original ideas, to my reckoning. They're very few and very far between though. And I certainly don't claim to be a creator of them ... yet. At best, I'm assembling contemporary ideas and materials into new configurations. But I'd have to say people like Duchamp, Picasso and Cage were originators. You could get all Platonic and say they tapped into universal ideas that already existed and get the credit for bringing them to the broader public. Still, they moved tectonic plates, culturally speaking.

JW - Yeah they did.  Near on 100 years ago.  In this day and age of world wide connection, I question if a truly unique and original idea is possible.  Sure we can adapt existing stuff into a unique state, but its all derivative.  

Hang on, I think were saying the same thing, your cups just more full than mine.

Ok, so taking a few steps back. 16 deadlines. I know you well but here’s a question for the wider public.  What are these other hats you ware that make the balance between your art and wider existence so tenuous, and people, the big reveal - Kent was a corporate jock in a previous life. How did you get from there to here?

JW - Yes, it's true. Out of school I did a commerce degree and then went into retail. At 24 I was flying to Perth and Sydney to train people twice my age in how to conduct good customer service. I had no idea about art. I studied economics and marketing and strategic management. I'd never done art in my life, not even at primary school. But while I was a corporate desk monkey I was playing in a band, making short films, designing graphics for fun, teaching myself how to use software to make animations and filling dozens of notebooks with ideas and drawings. I assumed I missed the boat with creative stuff and I'd have to accept it was just a hobby to pursue. After a few years I found I was being creative all night - often until 3 or 4am - and then dragging my reluctant arse to work in the morning. The longer this went on, the more miserable I became. It became obvious that I was compelled to be creative so I needed to give myself over to it or risk dying with regrets and having a heart attack way before my time. So I applied to art school and here we are.

I do lots of other things besides my own art. Some of them I do to pay the rent, like proofreading high school textbooks and online resources. Some of them help pay the rent as a happy side-benefit but they primarily serve to advance my art, like teaching, writing and curating. Only recently have the last two activities resulted in any revenue outcomes. I really love teaching and find that to be a great companion to art making. I feel obliged to engage with teaching because it took me so long to figure out what I wanted to do. I'd like to have a hand in helping anyone interested in art to fulfill their passion for it. I had some amazing teachers at art school and some pretty lame ones. The ones who were passionate, knowledgeable, energetic and generous have armed me very well to do what I do. I've seen dozens of wide-eyed students be unmotivated and unstimulated by shit teachers and shit systemic issues and it's a waste of talent and energy. The more people curious about the world and creatively engaged with it, the better for all of us. Being around that inspires and motivates me to work my arse off. 

I consider all the creative outputs I do - teaching, writing, dancing, walking, sound, curating - to be parts of the intricately woven fabric of my work.

Kent Wilson - work in progess

JW - I could go into rants about the state of Arts education, but for the sake of the public I won’t. There’s only so much of our ideas the people can cope with in one read Kent. Just be a firecracker teacher and make sure those young minds question every thing you and everyone else tells them.

As a emerging artist near on a couple of decades senior to most of your recently graduating peers you must have reasonably clear ideas and motivations for pursuing art beyond just a compulsion. What do you see as the roll of the visual arts in contemporary society?

KW – At the moment I see it as rather sadly under appreciated. At Monash I teach students about visual language and the sort of areas we cover include car culture, architectural influence on urban design, the psychology of geography, the power of advertising imagery, gender representation and a whole swathe of issues that are critically important to understanding our place in the world. Visual art provides an incredibly valuable way to analyse and interpret the world around us. It incorporates an awareness of how things are made, how objects relate to each to other, how behaviours influence others and how power structures work.

I had a fairly high-end education where I was schooled at the finest grammar schools in Australia and at a prestige international-standard university. I came out of that without ever having contact with the ideas and skill sets I’ve been exposed to in visual art. Art should be a fundamental aspect of early education. The biggest misunderstanding here is that art is for artists, and that artists are those people who know how to draw realistically. That’s patently wrong. Some of the most artistic people I know are CPAs, motor mechanics and inventory controllers. But they don’t even know that they think like artists. My contention is that if they were exposed to the ideas inherent in visual language and art early in their education, they would be even better armed to do what they do and do it well.

Art transcends all cultural structures. It exists in tribal communities, in capitalist societies and in socialist utopian communes. It is inherently a driving inner urge and finds outlets in film, in advertising, in cars, in tabletops, in shoes, in cooking, in politics and potentially any form of human activity. From that point of view, we should have a better understanding of it. It can be used for both good and evil and knowing how, why and to whom this is done is critically important.

Kent Wilson, 'cell'

Kent Wilson's 'not dissimilar' exhibition launch is on the 8th June at 4.30pm and runs until the 7th July 2013.

Meet Your Maker: Grant Nimmo

Wild forests, floating neon orbs, voodoo skulls by candle light and drum sets collapsing into the grass. Is it 'Newage' or is it 'New Age'?  I've been captivated and intrigued by Grant Nimmo's work for some time. His gallerist - Anna Pappas - was around the corner from where I lived in Prahran and a rare jewel on the south side of the Yarra. I saw his work there a couple of years ago and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. This winter he's brought a body of work to Stockroom and it's contemporary painting at its best. Original, expertly crafted, layered with meaning and eye-ball throbbingly gorgeous. I had a chat with Grant and threw some questions his way about his work.

a smorgasbord of drawing and painting power in the Project Space at Stockroom

Kent:
Hey Grant. I love this weird mix of Romanticism and vaguely dark psychedelic hippy-ness that you have in your work. What draws you to this sort of imagery and these themes?

Grant:
I guess it's a combination of things that happened that draw me to these images. I grew up in the outer suburbs of melbourne, there aren't a heap of galleries out there, maybe even none. Or at least none that i knew of. So my early education in art wasn't through looking at art hanging on walls or even in books, I knew of a couple of artists that I looked at in school (I liked Goya) but that was it.

My real early education in art came as a teenager taking the day off school and looking through record covers in record stores in the city, like Augogo and Missing Link. This was great because I loved punk and folk music and browsing the album covers tied in with my love of drawing and of the visual side to making things. So it was a really exciting thing for me to see that these things seemed to just naturally belong together. At the time I worked in the local supermarket and I would spend some of my money on records. At that point a 7 inch vinyl was about $5 so if I was looking through the singles and I saw an album cover that I thought was great, or an album title that I thought was cool regardless of whether I had heard the band, I'd just take a chance and buy it.

So for me music was basically what art was. So then my early education to music was through my dads and my uncles records.. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix etc.. 60's and 70's stuff. So I guess that's where the psychedelic thing started for me. I guess I have moved away from this now and I don't really listen to those old records that much but it seems it was so influential to me that it just sort of stuck. I guess that music is pretty romantic and it kind of leads to other avenues, listening to led Zeppelin I ended up reading the lord of the rings, cause they seemed to like it. And on it goes. I think I look at it like anything anyone makes is just a reflection of where you happen to be standing at any point in time. An artist just looks, learns and re directs.

Kent:
I want to delve into this underlying sense of unease that sits just below the surface of the works. There's upside down mountains, for example, that evoke a sense of imbalance, of inverted gravity. And maybe because there's hints of the new-age and commune culture, and we all know that kind of dream for a utopian society with a connection to nature pretty much failed for anyone who tried, for me there's this really captivating feeling of ... 'forests, sunshine, freedom, oh my god i wish it was summer right now... oh, wait ... did that tree just talk to me? holy fuck i think the rainbow is turning black and is coming to strangle me.'

Grant:
Turning a painting upside down is always unsettling, seeing anything turned upside down is always a bit unsettling. I think it’s unsettling because it opens a slightly different perspective and just that slight slip can actually be a bit horrifying. It reveals that you had no idea what you were looking at all along. Especially if it is something that you have stared at intently for a period, something that you feel like you know quite well. All of a sudden you are re looking at it and you no longer trust what you have experienced. That element of anxiety is always an important part of it. I do always want things to be poetic when i am making work, and for anything to become a beautiful poem the anxiety of reality has to be in there, but of course it has to work in some kind of harmony with everything else, like any cultural attachments the image might have. It’s needed in order to feel excited about not knowing what is going on. I think confusion is a good starting point for anything.

Kent:
There's so much nature going on in your work. But it's a filtered nature, as if seen through binoculars or the distortion of lysergic acid or through nostalgia. And there's a strong northern hemisphere representation of nature - perhaps a representation of an ideal of nature. What's your feeling about our engagement with the environment, of mountains, forests and streams (at least in so far as dealt with in your work)?

Grant Nimmo, Eat Your Skull, 2011

Grant:
Obviously people on the whole are pretty accustomed to not dealing with nature on a day to day basis, aside from the basics. Everything is accessible without even stepping outside. There are people who despise this and there are others that couldn't care less. I have spent a lot of time alone just camping or fishing or whatever, hanging out in the bush and I like this, I like doing that sort of stuff, but at the same time I know it's pretty boring. And i cant do it all the time. I think the thing I like about it is that there is for me this idea that something could happen. It sort of ignites my imagination a bit. I like to think about ghosts or witches eating children to try and scare myself a bit. I kind of see how a lot of folklore could just be made up by people sitting around with nothing to do. Which I think is great. I like to think about that being away from everything when I am in the city sometimes.. Because its just more boring at times than the alternative.. But it's harder to think there in the city.

So I guess the idealised nature in the work I make is really just a symbol of wanting to think and wanting silence.

Kent:
So, what's ahead for the rest of the year and beyond?

So the next show planned is the Melbourne art fair with Anna Pappas in August, where I'll also be giving a talk on Martin Kippenberger in a forum on post-conceptual painting. After that I'll be back in the studio for a while.

 - - - -

The exhibition runs until 8 July.
Grant is exhibiting with us courtesy of Anna Pappas Gallery - a great venue in Prahran, showing some amazing artists.

coming june

sneaky peaky, impending june

oooh ... magali's deliciously designed invites have come in the door, all ready for promoting next month's show. click on the image below and go through to our, also deliciously designed by magali, website for more details.

june invites fresh from the printer

Meet Your Maker: Larry Parkinson

Larry Parkinson is a wonderful artist, a lovely chap and a stalwart of the Stockroom scene (if such a thing could be said after only 2 years!). His work has proven extremely popular here and it's easy to see why. It's got visual intensity; it crosses boundaries between print, painting, drawing and graphic design; and it tugs on elements of symbolic meaning that resonate with our contemporary lives. I recently had a chat with Larry to find out more about his current exhibition, Dressing up for the devil, and he generously divulged some of the ideas permeating the work ...

People were drawn to Larry's work at the opening, often spending a lot of time with each piece.

The rich layering reveals hidden secrets and spatial depth with extended viewing.

- - - - - 

Kent:

So, Larry, 'Dressing up for the devil' is the title of your show - which evokes both a playfulness and a risk. Dressing up implies preparation for fun, but the devil is dangerous. Can you give a bit of insight into why you chose this name?

Larry:
Well Kent, the playful aspect is a major element and it is a playful title. We all need to make sure our shoes have been polished and our hair is brushed (I will just wear a tie!) as we prepare ourselves for a willful destiny. It's more like a Breugel meets Johnny Cash album!

It is about you and an idea and the seduction of making and the moving from the personal to the publication - dressing up for the devil - and as you say, playfulness and risk.

Larry Parkinson, Imp (detail), 2012

The title also refers to the duality in the works, not exactly a good and evil morality battle but more a subtle physical line between two or more ideas, possibilities, existing in one work and the hierarchy of these. We do not make snap shots of our worlds but are always processing many layers of meaning.

So in this way the title is more poetic than literal.

Kent:
You utilise a lot of erasure and stripping back in your painting process. What's the motivation for that technique?

Larry:
This way of working serves my process in a couple of ways, one of which is about incubation and sometimes procrastination, having to prepare or find the boards and make layers of under-painting takes time, and I find this helps in the forming of ideas - I guess I am playing.

The influence of having made etchings and using a process of scraping to reveal the image or as a means of correction that exposes the history of the plate intrigues me, but I can just as easily be seduced by the different layers of paint when sanding my weatherboards before putting my contribution on top.  So it is this idea of covering and recovery that became the starting point for this technique. It's also hard to control the results, there is a certain physical resistance in the process, an unpredictability that I enjoy.

Of course this process produces a unique mark, that is quite different from the drawn or rendered and I really like how the two interact within an image. In this body of work the resulting mark has often been the element that sets the image, so I mean the colour or the shape reminded me of an object, a bit like a Rorschach thing.

Even though the process of erasing can be brutal to an extent, I'm not interested in making heroic statements or marks with power tools - but using it more of a reverse drawing technique. I like to interrupt the narrative of the image with this idea of erasing and stripping back until there is a new cohesion. It seems to be working at the moment - we'll see how this process evolves.

 Larry Parkinson, A mortal tale (detail), 2012

Kent:

Could you tell us a bit about how you go about choosing the particular subjects that appear in your work? They have a very symbolic, almost iconic, feel about them.

Larry:

The images or subjects in these works are very much like a catalyst and so in this way can create the thread through the works. This means rather than choosing a particular subject there is an evolution of an idea and concept. Thematically the work has been dealing with duality or a parallel possibility, the idea that one belief or activity could be masking another.

I suppose that I could choose to illustrate this in a more direct or concrete way but I feel the work should be seductive and act as a lure into the idea and become an ornament to this idea rather than just being didactic.

I have combined found images, some are a substitutes for the human form, like tools (sourced from hardware catalogues) that are designed to be used for extending the body like ladders, wheelbarrows, objects to be used in toiling, -  'idle hands makes the devil's work'. In this way they could be seen as symbolic - but played off with a decorative decoy of a halo of gold 'coins' does become almost iconic but slightly ironic too. 

- - - - -

Big thanks to Larry for taking the time to chat about his work. It's so nice to hear all the research, all the ideas and all the thought that goes into the creation of these beautiful artworks. It reminds me of that feeling you get with books on bookshelves, that locked inside each cover is a whole world of imagination. What better way to adorn your world than with the power-packed wonder of art!

Dressing up for the devil runs until 3 June.

may opening

a great night last night for our May openings, an excellent turnout and wonderful atmosphere. Debra supplied some nibbles to keep the burgeoning crowd refreshed, Beck kept the drinks flowing, and people met and mingled amongst a fine array of artworks.

 Pandarosa's Andii (left) and Ariel (looking handsome and ponderous)

contemplating the evocative landscapes of Debra Goldsmith

getting up close and personal with Debra's Ghost and Solace(Mourning Tree)

drawing a crowd to Larry Parkinson's work

it's the art that rewards time spent with it that is the art that lasts

 Larry's work has a lot of symbolic  imagery and it was great to see which works appealed to different people

 

more Larry

 Debra Goldsmith deservedly basking in the popularity of her paintings

 

chock-a-block in the galleries

inspecting Pandarosa's collages and paintings

 

it's always fascinating to see the detail of how art is made

some discussion about favourite works

   the milling crowd of art lovers

 pondering Pandarosa

 

catching up for a chat

a swirling flow of people

 

contemplating Larry

the shows run until 3 June and there's nothing like seeing the artwork in the flesh. each show by Debra, Larry and Pandarosa has been well crafted into a considered body of work, giving each gallery space its own particular character and feeling.
 

exhibition preview

could this be a whole new subgenre of video? trailers for art exhibitions.

this saturday our May shows kick off at 430pm with art by Debra Goldsmith, Larry Parkinson and Pandarosa. it's open to the public and we warmly invite you along.

last chance to see, three setting suns

Today is the last chance to check out the current exhibitions, featuring:
Jason Waterhouse, Martin Hodge and Bryan Spier, Rhett D'Costa, Renee Cosgrave, Liang Luscombe and Troy Christmass.

Jason's actually going to be demolishing his installation in the afternoon, welcoming people to climb on his mound, pull it apart and even take bits away with them if they want.

And here's a little refresher reminder of the art from the group exhibition:

open and close and open and close

There's a certain cyclical nature with art exhibitions. Shows go up, we have a big launch, they run for a month, there's another surge of rejuvenated interest as they near their end, and then off the walls and floor they come before everything gears up again and kapow! New art exhibition opening. It's like rapidly changing seasons.

This weekend is the last chance to catch a glimpse of Jason's and Martin's work, and the curated show I put together. And for some of the work, the last chance to get your hands on it for yourself. I know it's my job to advise on buying art, but I could quite happily give you plenty of good reasons to pick up any of the art in these shows. Every single one of the artists is just the sort of artist that (a) works really hard, (b) produces clever work that is also visually compelling, and (c) shows great potential to continue developing and producing high quality art in the future. While there's really only one good reason you should buy it - because you like it - these other reasons seal the deal. Plus you get to be a part of that wonderful tradition of supporting the arts.

Next weekend, the exhibition cycle resets and we kick off with a new set of terrific artists and artworks. Our openings are open invite and we would love to see you come along. The images here are of recent openings we've had, where there's much merriment, a chance to meet interesting people, or just look at the handsome and pretty ones, have a relaxing drink and even do some late night shopping. Thanks to an unnaturally high abundance of quality restaurants on Piper Street, you can start at the opening and then head off to dinner afterwards. Perfect really.

Martin Hodge: concept and execution

Martin’s work has always been popular at Stockroom. It’s bold, it’s architectural, and it’s playful. And for his current exhibition he has again delivered work with a characteristic punch. His large steel screens in particular carry a special potency, a beautiful balance of idea and material. The steps he’s taken along the way to bring the work to its final resolution are thoughtful and executed with precision.

Martin Hodge, Barbie

At a distance we see familiar characters – Barbie, Batman, a lamb. They’re photographic and appear as if they have depth and tone. Not dissimilar to scaled up images from a newspaper print. But at closer inspection they reveal something mind-blowing. The screen is completely black, no grey tones whatsoever, and punctured with hexagons of varying size.

So there’s a few questions this triggers off. Why have these normally tiny little dolls and action figures been blown up to human scale, and what impact does that have? Why are they lasercut into steel, and not, say, printed on paper or painted on canvas? And why have they been manipulated digitally before putting them on the walls?

Martin Hodge, Batman and Lamb

Maybe blowing up to human scale makes you realise the caricature nature of the figures. It amplifies the thin limbs of Barbie, the bulging muscles of Batman. A skinny, 5 foot tall bobble-headed Barbie is hardly an attractive proposition to anyone. She couldn’t possibly stand on those teensy feet. And the classic ‘condom-full-of-walnuts’ physique of Batman would not instil a sense of confidence in anyone relying on him to fight against a villain. He’d barely be able to put his hands together. A 4 year-old would kick him in the codpiece before he had a chance to swing his meaty arms in any direction. Who are these idols? These frail figures of celebration.

This leads on to another slightly haunting element in the imagery - a sense of religious iconography. A lamb and a jesus-christ pose. Sacrificial figures delivered to us as membranes through which shadows are cast on walls. Figures of power, rendered in miniature plastic and resized in steel.

Maybe the lasercut steel is a filter. The images created exist in our minds thanks to the gaps in the screen. We acquire so many of our cultural stories through screens – literal and metaphoric. They are filtered, some parts highlighted, some parts edited out. And what about hexagons? Hexagons in rows look like beehives. Beehives are made up of worker drones and one queen who births all the young. And all the young grow up inside little hexagon rooms.

And maybe, digital manipulation is an extension of the artistic urge itself. Think of early humans picking up a charcoaled branch from the fire and scraping it across a flat rock to make a line. 21^st century artists can capture the light reflecting off objects in a box that converts that light into coded digits of 1s and 0s. There’s all manner of magic that can be conjured up after that. Robots can print out those images by shooting lasers through steel. Imagine that!

Meet Your Maker: Anton Hasell

Anton Hasell is an artist bursting with energy and just the sort of person you can lob a probing inquiry to and he’ll respond with a firework display of bright stories, concepts and impassioned pleas. He is the ideal interviewee, or even companion over coffee. In many ways Anton was an early artistic influence on me, little to either of our awarenesses. His bells at Birrarung Marr stimulated and reinforced my own desire to pursue art, as I wandered about the city in the wee hours of the morning, plagued by insomnia and wrestling with a decision to return to school at age 30.

I’ve interviewed Anton previously, in a different context, which you can read here  if you’d like more of insight into Anton and his creations. His current exhibition with us at Stockroom gave me an excuse to chat again, this time more specifically about this body of work – ‘Quest to find an inland sea’.

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KENT: Hi Anton. For your exhibition with us you have created a form of background narrative that informs the content of the artworks. So, aside from the material artworks themselves - the panels, the painting, the laser-cut and constructed metal tree - there is also a story that you have constructed that accompanies the exhibition about geography and the reinterpretation of history. Could you divulge a little bit of that for us?

ANTON: Hi Kent, Cherry Blossom Tree (Prunus serrulata von mueller) whose discovery along the shoreline of the inland sea offers a serious challenge to the 'Wallace line' flora and fauna disjunction theory and the implication that Australia is part of Gondwanaland, one of the fragments that also includes Africa and Sth America. If the species Prunus serrulata can be shown to be common from North Asia to the Australian continent, then clearly, in a geographic sense, Australia must be understood as an essentially Asian country. Our cultural future, responding to geography, should be to continue to splice the threads of an Asian future that is clearly forming before us.

The inland sea, so long invisible to our European eyes whose vast expanse was amazingly just missed by every inland explorer other than Leichhardt, saturates the centre of this country by bringing to the surface the intricate vascular network of the artesian basin spread out beneath Australia and the Asian Islands to the north of us. These works on brass and copper panels are observations I have made from the shores of the inland sea. There are beautiful islands whose indentations are perfectly scaled in equal tempered array, in size and distance apart, on whose bank a bell buoy has come to grief. Perhaps the tolling of its great bell have rutted the topology to musical perfection, so trace your fingers across its undulation to feel the musicality of a braille touch. Some land forms are clearly dangerous, and small light towers are installed to warn off the innocent, though a drifting boat seems to have been empty of these kind of people. Other island's rolling waves have keep florescent inflatables beyond their safe harbour. But where birds dash across the waves, or fish swim into eager beaks, life can shimmer along the edges of the inland sea.  The Cherry Blossom Tree thrives in the marshy tidal flows, and like clockwork the weather patterns and flocks of birds cycle through their season.

For those who know my work, this exhibition is a continuation of a long essay into finding how it is that we can come to live in this mysterious continent. It began in the 1990s with the manufacture of wearable deep sea diving suits to be used on fishing boats in the Great Southern Ocean where each of us could be lowered to a depth where light failed and coldness reached the marrow of our bones such that we embraced our own mortality and our European heritage's relevance faded.  At this point we could look up to the light above, be pulled up toward the boat's deck and, Lazarus-like, birthed back on deck with new eyes with which to see the Australian landscape for the first time. The second body of work has been to make the tools of navigation and the beaten copper maps that Leichhardt might use to leave the crowded shoreline of the continent to traverse this distracted continent. Clearly the European  compass, set square, sextant and paper maps misdirected navigation across the Australian otherness, and new navigation instruments are needed to be tuned to the turn of the Southern Cross Constellation across the night sky, the intricate and beautiful flight patterns of mobs of budgies and the sonorous archetypal sounds of ocean waves found in a shell instrument of navigation. On so flat a landscape only the beating of copper sheet against the earth can elucidate the subtle and ongoing marks of time, occupation and undulation as can be felt in fingertips.

 

These artworks on the Inland Sea begin a body of work that asks the question "how can we live in the heart of this county of ours, once we have left its crowded shores and travelled to its interior?" My collection of observations from the coast of the inland sea are fragmentry to be sure, but I am showing some evidence of attempts to make crossings and things found that invite speculation upon the meanings we can attach to 'Australianess' and its impact on how we can live productively and creatively with one another. Beneath the spring blooming of the Prunus Serrulata von mueller what ceremonies can we enact that connect us in ritual and collective shared cultural experience? Our community well-being rests on each of us sharing our creative imaginations with the rest of us. In a world of economic limits, our democratic and market-based use of asset accumulation as a measure of social status is set to fail, and we only need to look at tribal communities to see that in a shared garden (the arithmetic economic growth of feudalism) social worth is attributed to those that grow the best yams, those whose dancing, singing, painting and other story telling activities are best enjoyed and those whose shared cultural creativity is the source of the regard they have in their community. A steady-state (non-growth) economic theory will need to be structured on sociological frames. Up until only a mere 200 years ago we lived in an agrarian economy of small markets, barter and subsistence. This was an economy in which there was an ongoing contest between, as Malthus put it, geometric population growth and arithmetic agricultural growth. We then devised a mercantile model of investment (including the future in our economic equation) that resulted in a turbo market mechanism. It was, to use a metaphor, like building an internal combustion motor versus maintaining and riding a horse. We have, in the 'shed' of economics and engineering, built a wonderful V8 turbo-charged motor in the course of those 200 years. We started the motor and were stunned by its sheer power but in that short period of just 200 years (Man, we just got it running right!!), we have come to see that for all its power and beauty, it consumes fuel like there is no tomorrow, and belches fumes that choke those of us in the shed (most of us, as you know, are outside the shed looking in). Someone pointed out that while it could, in a slight frame, power us down the straight in 3.5 seconds for the quarter mile, in fact it was to be installed in a bus body, as we all of us needed to be transported by it to our collective future. The task before us is to modify the V8 motor to pull a community bus on very little fuel (or alternative fuels) gently and reliably. Our steady-state economy has to be about the bus frame, seats, comfort station and all else, as much as it has to be about the dynamics of the motor itself. This is why the work ahead requires a new set of definitions on the quality of life, and why asset accumulation will have to become a non-measure of community and individual feelings of wellbeing, and why, (because I am sure you have forgotten by now) we need new rituals, ceremonies and social engagements beneath our newly discovered Prunus serrulata von mueller tree.

So Kent, let this work inspire others to investigate the diverse coastal life to be found along the shores of the inland sea and let the brave put out into it and sail their way across the heart of our mysterious and wondrous country.

KENT: These are wonderously romantic passions Anton. That probably should be romantic with a capital 'R', but I can't abide by such heirarchical concessions, so I'm maintaining a lowercase democratic level-playing field of ideological artistic movements. And the romantic urge is on the upswing in recent times as we all feel compelled to re-embrace an environmental awareness in the face of the consequence of our collective actions, driving ever onward with the smoking combustion engine of our consumerist urge. 

With this in mind, I wanted to ask you about your materials. You often use metals - brass, bronze, steel and copper - in your various creations. What draws you to these elemental and heavy substances hewn from below the surface of the planet?

Your reference to the "romantic" caused me to write volumes on Modernism, Post Modernism and Suzi Gablik's call for a 're-constructed' and 're-enchanted' participatory kind of art practice (Gablik. S 'The Re-enchantment of Art', Thames and Hudson, London, 1998) that was central to my PhD thesis (2002) investigations into the experiential nature of Art. Lucky for you, I have put these aside for another time, and will let it (the 'Romantic' description) slide past, except remarking that those who follow the followers of others are already two steps behind themselves, however great they may personally feel at being one of the 'in' crowd. My journey as an artist is within and through and about the insights I can gather from my own personal experience of life unfolding before me. Not that this needs be diaristic alone, or completely self-obsessed, for as you can see I tackle historical, political and social ideas through the lens of my own personal feelings and my thoughts about my place within these contexts. Perhaps I am naughty doing this! Everything I know has been or is being framed in my own imagination. Artists are people who are excessively attracted, I expect,  to their own moment of living, and they document the substances wrung from investigations into this 'being' that never stops, day and night. Yes, I will let you call it 'romantic' but I cannot see what the alternative might be! Might an alternative be that there are clever emerging artists who are encyclopaedically aware of the cultural context, who are networked and networking, connected to the cultural power centres and those significant individuals at the centre of these art groups, sophisticated, global, fashionable, smart and successful? I have heard it put that way, and I can kind of see the tribalism that underwrites these followers and their followings. Hey, I am starting to fire up again..... enough! 

Yes, OK, call me romantic, but what I will hear as you say it is that here is someone doing their very best to make sense of so complicated a thing as being alive amongst so many other equally alive others. When I was in grade 5 a boy said to me one day after school that he was going home to "mum"! I was really confused. I was going home to "mum", he wasn't going to be there! I had no idea where he was going to go to, but in all truth, I knew that where ever he might go, he was not going home to "mum". It made me wonder where he was going to go that night, in fact, where did they all go after school? Luckily for me, in my confusion, I still had my mum to go home to and to feel safe by. Accepting that others are not just figments of one's imagination is not easy at all. To accept that every other person I meet is as introspective, questioning and in search of a meaning to their life as I am for myself is difficult. But it is true. No, really, it is! It is. You who read this writing must see that I am one like you... indeed, very like you... even worryingly too like you... OK, not just a passing shape, not a fragment of any kind of your dreaming, no, not even another part of you. Just very like you. Awfully like you, probably! (OK, I have "mum" and you don't, but I should try to get past this feeling). So, I make art to tell my story of me to me, and I want you to make your art (any kind at all will do) to tell your story to yourself, to which I can listen in.  I know from going into the studios of my friends that their works inspire me, thrill me, and make me want to run home to my studio to make works in response to their work, and when they come to my studio I see their eyes widen (now and then) and feel their wanting to run home to make work that responds to my work. I make work for me, but I hope it brings out responses in others that assure me that their interior lives are as vast and as fascinating as I find my own. And so very similar too. In an ideal world we all will make works manifesting our self conversations, and these works will resonate with one another, and shared creative imagination will be the test of social connectivity, the measure of social contribution, the gold standard of social worth and the final realisation that we are not alone in the world. In this utopian (but possible) world there are no artists, just people engaged in collective play with themselves and with others.

So, what materials do I like to work in? For a long period I enjoyed working with cheap materials like the steel of 44 gallon drums or corrugated iron in large scale sculpture and in cast bronze for studio work, having kept a studio foundry since 1983. But the slow rusting away of these works became unbearable. Beautiful steel sculptures slowly dissolving renders the immense work and effort put into these sculpture invisible through time, and so in the early nineties when building my bluestone house that will never leave the landscape, I decided to only work in materials of permanence, so that my 'messages in a bottle' can reach those in the future with which they might resonate. I work in copper, bronze, stainless steel and laser-cut steel plate as and when these materials make appropriate sense of the form and concept of the work. Naturally, as much of my work is for public-spaces, materials that are robust through time are a requirement for this practice. I am very interested in new digital possibilities in sculpture and matching these with traditional processes from the ancient forms of art making. As the new bell designs are possible only with sophisticated digital design software, the casting of the bells happens using ancient techniques reaching back to the start of the bronze age. I make relief prints using laser-cut stainless steel plates whose images are developed in design software, but print the plates on a printing press with traditional printmaking papers and inks. They could be digitally printed of course, but something truly beautiful happens when old and new processes and technologies are brought together to make works of art. In this exhibition exploring the inland sea, I have used brass and copper plates and applied hand-beaten textures to create particular surfaces and then applied traditional chemical patinas to colour the metal through corrosion. Somehow this process allowed me to look for playful ways of making sea surfaces that felt the tidal currents beneath the surface and the wind pressure above the undulating surface plane. 

These materials are a continuation of, and development from, those used in the last two exhibitions at LaTrobe University VAC ('The maps of Leichhardt' November 2010) and at Woodbine Art in Malmsbury ('Leichhardt's Bell' March 2011) and so remain consistent with the quest to explore Australian identity through imagined history. I love working with elegant materials like these and working out how to shape them to get the look and feel I want. As I work the material, I trust that my hands will leave the marks and shapes in the materials beyond my direct intention, as they work tuned to subliminal sensibilities that I cannot control. My work surprises me and gives me joy and when it works well it is much more than I intend, and the more is the better part. That is the challenge of making things and images, and always chasing the thing you imagine. Each work is a pearl on a thread followed in trust and pleasure. I hear of artists destroying works, but no working in the 'third person' (see earlier comment) for me. I love my works and while none are perfect, (we agree!) none are separate from the others either. It is a body of work that is left, but in process, there is always the wonderful thing imagined, the struggle to realise the imagined thing best as one can, but imperfectly achieved, and the newly imagined thing glowing in beauty and wonder that has grown out of the previous wondrous imagining(s). How good is that, to chase down thoughts and feelings, hand over fist?  So, Kent, I hope these works in the exhibition give those who share them some of the pleasures they have given me.

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Anton’s exhibition, ‘Quest to find an inland sea’, runs until April 8, 2012. All of his beautifully hand-wrought, narrative-imbued metallic artworks serve as individual reliquaries, his passionate ideas poured into the fabric brass, bronze and copper. Forming a horizon line around the gallery space, they enframe the viewer and the large Cherry Blossom tree that reaches upwards toward the sunlight that fliters down through the industrial era factory beams. Wonderful stuff.