Lizard, Half Handstand & Downward Dog

 

 

 

 

These were at Arc 1 in 2010. Streamers, tissue paper, glue over a wire armature. A bit over life size.
Photos by Andrew Curtis.

In the future

 

Elastic bands and nails. I showed this at Linden in 2008.

Photo by Andrius Lipsys.

A public artwork by me....

Coming soon to a public place near you....

Putting it on a pole wasn't my idea. That is there for reasons of public safety and as an obstacle to graffitists. It looked better without.

More paintings returned!!!!!

These ones were in my brother George's shed. First there were the ones from the Funnell shipping container, then the ones I had to pick up from Arc 1 because they were making room in the stockroom, and the ones that Sam had in his office that he's brought home now that he's changed jobs. All in the last few weeks! Also I went to Neon Parc the other day and Geoff's like "Oh yeah, I have to give you back those works from that show."

Actually I quite like these paintings from George's shed. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw them. I did them in second year painting at RMIT. I had a collection of different patterned papers, like Victorian floral designs, and Christmas wrappings etc. I placed  a very large jar of water on the top of the selected papers, and did drawings of the distortions through the glass. You get these effects of stringy lines and big blobs. All my lines go back to that year of drawing.

carpet designs

Around the same time I entered the edra competition, I entered some designs for a competition Designer Rugs has. Basically, you design some rugs, and they choose the ones they like best, and they get made. I did not win this one either, but I really enjoyed doing it. If anyone reading this owns a rug company, will you please give me a job?

Thomas Schutte

My favourite artist.

A little known work of mine

It's from 2001. We did a rubik show at Sarah Cottier. Me, Andrew McQualter, James Lynch and Ricky Swallow.

"Force Majeure".
Ashley Barber took the photo.

This is the photo of me that Arc 1 has on their website

It's from 2000. Maybe it's time to give them a new one.

Bumper Stickers

These are from about 2002. I wanted to get the work out of the white walled gallery space and into the world. Andrius Lipsys took the photos.

This is how they were presented at Uplands that year - I made bigger versions of a few of the stickers, and I had Andrius' photos up.

Sorry I've forgotten who took these gallery shots.

My studio around that time....

Me doing a wall drawing

 This one is from 2004, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, as part of a show called Wall Power curated by Jenepher Duncan. The install shots are by Robert Owen, who was also in the show. My piece is called 'Invented Forest'

This is the original sketch. We projected it onto the wall. I had some great assistants working with me.

(you can see Andrew McQualter in the background, working on his piece)

The finished product.

Conversation Piece

A couple of years ago I applied for a residency with edra. I didn't win it, unfortunately, but I did get shortlisted, and I really enjoyed the experience. You had to design a product for them. This is what I came up with. It's inspired by the Visconti film 'Conversation Piece' starring Burt Lancaster. Burt plays a kind of straight laced academic boffin type, insulated from the world in his gorgeous palazzo in Rome, filled with his old paintings and books. He gets confronted with contemporary life in the form of a countess and her family - the countess is played by Sylvana Magnano, and her lover is played by Helmut Berger. They move upstairs and start renovating in complete 1970 style, so you get this almost violent clash of styles.

My idea was to apply marbled paper patterns, as found in the end papers of old books to aluminium using a dye sublimation technique. They do a lot of paper marbling over in Tuscany near where the edra factory is, so I thought that was a good connection. On the other side of the aluminium would be some sort of 'modern' colour, lime green or fluoro yellow or something.

My great-aunt Kathy won this book. She was famous in the family for her brilliance and crankiness.

I made these little models and photographed them.

You buy the pieces individually and you can stack them however you like.




After I was shortlisted, I asked an industrial designer to do proper drawings of them. (Thank you James Burns)

They look pretty slick now. One of the judges said he was disappointed the final product wasn't wonky and sagging. He thought that was part of the design, but it was just my model making.

After the presentation, Massimo Morozzi, the creative director of edra said to me, "Don't change, you should keep doing everything exactly how you are doing it." I wasn't sure if he meant I should just keep doing art and forget about design, or whether he included designing as part of what I was doing. I tried emailing him for further advice but he never got back to me.