Just reflectin’ on this and that
Here is the video of my performance By-product in the form in which it was live streamed on September 27, 2018. By-product explores the perception of bodies and social behaviour by turning a potentially sexy attitude into something grotesque.
Music
‘Horses’ – Workhorse
‘Beige II’ – Mannix Flowerday
Livestream/video/effects/nicolas cage courtesy of Zaratan Arte Contemporânea
Final residency post coming soon!
OPEN STUDIO OPENS TONIGHT!
That there is the poster.
We hung the show over the past two evenings. When I say ‘we’ I definitely do not count myself as a useful team member. I always forget how much I struggle with hanging until I step into a gallery with a pile of random shit I’ve made and someone asks my opinion on something. I usually just stand there pretending to think about it but really I am just wondering if I can just arrange everything on the wall in a vaguely symmetrical shape and be done with the whole thing. I also am absurdly bad at things that require precision – ie hanging something level on a wall. I literally broke my foot trying to level a painting a couple of years ago.
Luckily, Gemma and Jose (the Zaratan team) are great at what they do and also very patient with the likes of me. Laying all my work out on the ground I was surprised by the links and stories they were able to draw from things I was used to seeing haphazardly blue-tacked around my studio in no particular order.
Here is Gemma trying to find a way to make these little weirdos work together.
It was surreal to see people treat my work with such care, like they were precious objects. I don’t know if that is indicative of my not valuing my work enough or perhaps just the nature of my work. One of my pieces was a 6.5 metre painting that I hadn’t quite intended to be so long! It proved fairly difficult to hang, and had it been left to me would have probably ended up crookedly pasted in an ill-fitting corner. Here is the offending item –
Gemma has really helped me to understand the value of my process and the freedom with which I can just make and make and make. What I tend to see as a bunch of weird experiments can actually all come together and tell an (almost cohesive) story. I remember one of my illustration teachers at UniSA telling me that if you create something very quickly or very simple that doesn’t mean that it is worth any less than something time consuming or detailed. Which I liked at the time because it was relevant for me but the truth of it still hasn’t entirely sunken into my brain.
Here is everyone working on hanging yet another inconveniently large piece of my work whilst I stand idly by.
In other news, back home it was my grandpa Scott’s funeral today. I really wish I could have been there but am also relieved that I didn’t have to cry all day which is what I would have done. My dad suggested that I draw something to distribute at the funeral – here is one of the images I sent him – 
Scottie’s passing is bittersweet. As he grew older his memory deteriorated but he maintained an incredible optimism that inspired those around him. If you were to ask him how he was on any given day, he would likely tell you that he was ‘very well’ and assure you that if he wasn’t very well he would soon forget about it. He looked forward to each day and savoured simple pleasures like dancing in the supermarket, discussing languages, eating a piece of fish, contemplating characteristics of wool samples, going to the bank and hanging out with his best mate Alwyn (my grandma).
My final news is also very bittersweet. I got some great new shoes for work, those who know me well will understand that that a lot of thought was put into purchasing the correct size. Despite 45 minutes of wandering around the store googling Doc Marten sizing charts and different shoe lasts, I haven’t managed to escape the dreaded Doc Martens breaking in blister.
Seeya later drongos!
It is TIME FOR AN UPDATE!
First I recommend listening to this song because I can’t stop but I can guarantee that youtube will then deliver lots of 90s and early 2000s hits as a follow up. When I was in high school and made a new hotmail email address every week I was inspired to make disco_lemonade@hotmail.com (though I think I spelt disco with a ‘q’) but no one else seemed to think it was cool so it didn’t stick. I suppose I just used it to troll people on MSN messenger.
A LOT has been going on over here. Firstly there was the artist talk, which was nerve wracking and time consuming to prepare BUT very valuable in terms of making sense of my process and my work. The video of the talk is here.
Then Loki and I were NOT DJS, which was great fun. The gallery also hosted some performers that night, we had the pleasure of watching these two wild cards doing some boogin’ and casual box cutter holding. Video available here (the second half is footage of Loki and I playing sweet tunes with Australian animal noises over the top).
On a sad note my grandpa Scott passed away the night before the artist talk. It doesn’t quite seem like a reality because I am so far removed from my family at the moment. I think that it is something that I probably won’t fully realise until I go back to Adelaide for Xmas.
On a good but annoying note, I got a teaching job at a fairly prestigious language school. Annoying because I have a week of orientation that infringes upon my artist residency but good because I managed to bumble my way into a great opportunity. Also, I have a residence card now!
This week I tried out my performance piece, which now has a name – “By-product” and will be performed live this Thursday at the gallery. It will be live streamed also.
I have also been working on some things inspired by the performance but I won’t post any pictures yet because they will be unveiled in the open studio on Thursday.
In the meantime, here are the fruits of recent labour.
I had just discovered that a SPECIAL FRIEND in Melbourne had arranged for me to receive fresh new canvas for my birthday! (ONE THOUSAND THANK YOUS). So I started trying to come up with cool ideas, gone are the days when I can paint over the discarded canvases of students past, I didn’t want to waste it. So I drew the above image – I’ve being doing some more collage and it is inspired by some of the figures that I have been playing with.
But, I wasn’t into it, I didn’t want to waste my canvas on that picture. So I changed gear and did some selfie studies.
I was feeling a bit flat. I liked these studies but still couldn’t bring myself to touch the canvas in case my weird mood wrecked it somehow. So I painted on a big piece of wood Gemma fished out for me in the first week of the residency.
Not quite finished yet. Sometimes painting from a photograph drives me absolutely nuts and I can’t stop finding errors and redoing bits. But sometimes it’s really meditative to just paint in a more realistic style. I tried to use lighter colours than I usually do – I usually end up with dark purple and bright yellow skin tones. Every couple of years I seem to bust out a self portrait like this and then move on so I guess I was due for one.
OH BY THE WAY I AM 31 TODAY!!!!!!! WHAHOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Here is a brief overview of the current exhibition, Ponto I Ponto at Zaratan.
My only prior knowledge was that it was going to be ‘heaps of dicks’. Mine and Loki’s imaginations went pretty wild. We were like ‘is there going be actual dicks everywhere?’ It was actually a lot more slick than the haphazard dick fest we were imagining.
We have been eating A LOT of bananas. The Italians made a banana cake today and it is all gone but I dearly wish I had more. I really like how bright the bananas look up against the black and white. There is also a video compilation of lots of different videos where people have drawn or made or referred to dicks at inappropriate times. It’s very enjoyable.
Tonight Loki and I went to a performance art festival called (Re)union and watched a piece called Fletcha (arrow) by a Brazilian artist called Luara Learth. It took me by surprise, I really enjoyed it. She moved ultra-slowly and covered her face in read paint, it looked like it was oozing out of her face because she was so slow. Then she turned into gremlin and created lots of really intense and amazing tableaus. At one point I felt really sick because she kept moving her eyes and her face looked like burnt flesh and it just got to me. It was great though, I sent her a facebook message afterwards to let her know that I really liked it, and she told me she was glad I liked it.
It was always a bit of a red flag for me as an art teacher when a student mentioned that they wanted to make Disney art (university students by the way). It usually meant I’d have to get pretty brutal with the student at some point in an effort to get them to consider something beyond their love for all things Disney, or endure shitty reproductions of characters I know nothing about (what are you Frozen Elsa?).
Yesterday I was feeling a little lost and felt frustrated because I kept drawing the same kinds of pictures over and over. Then I remembered that when I was a kid I went through a phase where I just really loved drawing princess jasmines. I had a bit of a jasmine drawing system that I used to experiment with, pushing the limits to see what could make the most truly beautiful jasmine.
So I thought I’d revisit drawing princess jasmines.
Here are the basics according to child Alice’s drawing process.
To draw the most stunning jasmine you need to nail the curly shoes. The more curly, the more elegant and beautiful.
Also the hair needs a really lovely curl, and if you add lots of extra sections to her pony tail then she becomes more beautiful. Boofy pants is a must, amplify that hip to waist ratio with extra boof. Also, note that red outfit jasmine really opened the creative doors colour wise for jasmine outfits, you can put her in yellow or green clothes if you want. Jewellery wise, take style inspo from the geenie cos his golden geenie bracelets are actually superior to jasmine’s arm band. DONT FORGET JEWEL HEADBAND.
The first one isn’t quite beautiful enough. The face doesn’t matter at all as long as you pay close attention to the key areas outlined above.
Yellow jasmine was a lefty, child Alice wouldn’t have been into it. Also green jasmine is a little off brief but adult Alice started to add some different flavours.
The whole point of the princess jasmines, was to celebrate that commitment to drawing the same dumb stuff over and over again without overthinking it. I think I will be more open to letting myself do that instead of worrying about doing something new or more meaningful. There’s also probably a whole bunch of stuff here about how my views of ideal feminine bodies and expectations for how I should look were influenced but I haven’t had a coffee yet so don’t worry about it.
I wasn’t joking when I said I was going to start out drawing butts with my wrong hand.
Days 5-7 of the residency have seen a lot of this behaviour. The butts I can’t entirely explain but the wrongs hands I can. Probably in every one of my drawing classes I forced everyone to draw with their non-preferred hand. I find it’s a really good way to relax, reduce pressure and relinquish some control. It helps to deal with that feeling where you have a really cool, clear idea in your head of the awesome thing that you are going to do and then you end up with something bung, but not bung enough to make you laugh.
The past couple of days I have been sketching, collaging (digitally and on paper), printing, sculpting and thinking about what form my performance might take.
Here is my ACTION PLAN:
And here is a selection of some of the experiments I have been doing.
I’m trying not to think too much about what where I am going with all this. I’m just trusting that along the way there will be delightful moments where I unlock new ideas or ways of approaching things.
I’ve been doing a lot of wandering around Lisbon and soaking things up. There are abandoned buildings everywhere, hand painted tiles on everything, bandy legged old dudes stealing stone fruit from the mini market, tiny coffees, sardines, otherworldly ice cream, practical footwear (cobble stone streets yo), dog poo everywhere, pleased looking dogs everywhere, hills, bakeries, cheap cheese, old ladies in markets that make you sample chickpeas off the end of their bread knives – that kind of stuff. Here are some visuals,
and then there’s other stuff like vege maccas, street art, indoors art and a bizarre shower that reminds me of 60s movies where people are being futuristic.
Just for a moment reflect on how monumental it is for there to be a delicious vege option at maccas. I’m truly lovin’ it.
Sooooo, back to the art stuff, I think I always thought that it would feel really contrived or forced to be like ‘I’m so inspired by this place, my art is responding to this special thing blah blah blah’ during my residency, but its nice to see that there are definite influences from my surroundings and they are true to my style and personality and it feels natural.
Today I finally allowed myself to go to the art store with a budget of 50 euro, I spent 55. I walked away with a feeling of exhilaration because I have new art supplies and regret because I just blew heaps of cash on art supplies. Does anyone else spend like an hour puzzling over acrylic paints trying to weigh up economic value versus quality with no knowledge except for the price and packaging??? IT TAKES ME FOREVER and I forgot to buy just regular white paint. I invested in some super heavy gel medium for the first time and some weird looking beige house paint from the Chinese MEGASTORE pictured below, strange architecture.
That’s it for today, we just got back from an opening at the gallery called ponto I ponto, I’ll upload some photos of it soon, it reminded me of Zac Svendsen and Carl Jiorjio‘s favourite game ‘I draw a dick, you draw a dick’. There were free bananas (high quality).
Zaratan live streams their events and if you want to see this particular one it is available here. I recommend skipping to 2h 47m to see a baby riding a cat. On September 15th, Loki and I will be delivering a Not-DJ set which will be live streamed until we breach the copyright laws, I will provide more details closer to the date.
The basics,
WHERE? Zaratan Arte Contemporânea
But WHERE IS THAT? Lisbon, Portugal
HOW LONG? One month
WHAT DO YOU DO DURING AN ARTIST RESIDENCY? I don’t really know yet. My impression of this residency so far is WORK MAKE PLAY MAKE MAKE WORK WORK WORK PLAY MAKE etc etc. I have been assured that there is no pressure to create a ‘final product’ so I am going to use this opportunity to have fun with my art and see where that leads me.
WHY LISBON? Just had a good feeling about it and spontaneously applied for the residency.
Days 1 and 2,
were basically just Loki (my fiancè) and I relishing in our new digs. We had been staying in Airbnbs and hostels since we arrived and were ready to stay in one place for a bit.
On Day 3,
I had my first meeting with the gallery directors Gemma and Jose, and the other two resident artists, two Italians Gianluca and Marco. The Italians are collaborating on a very epic sounding project – I won’t give too much away but there’s talk of masks, prints, urban mythology, found objects, zines and street parties. The more I heard about their plans, the more I felt that my approach was totally opposite. When I try to plan things too comprehensively it always feels contrived and stresses me out. My plan was to buy a big piece of paper and start drawing some butts with my non-preferred hand. I tried not to feel too self conscious when it was my turn to explain what I was going to do during the residency but I definitely felt like I was being very vague after hearing the Italian plans.
We are going to do artist talks during the residency – my first one! I was initially anxious and was like ‘what the hell would I even tell people?’ but then I remember I spent five years getting paid to rant to uni students about art and art processes and realised it will be fun, so that’s cool.
The meeting ended with a 40min discussion about why risograph printing is the worst thing to happen in the world vs why its actually really nice and cool, and Gemma digging up a big piece of compressed bark chip wood stuff for me to paint on which I quickly scuttled off to my studio with.
Basically, if you are interested – my plan so far consists of playing around with drawing, painting, sculpture, multimedia, performance and dance.
Loki and I also began Portuguese classes which is nice. I LOVE HAVING A TEXT BOOK! I LOVE HOMEWORK…how long will this last….
Day 4,
The first official day of work! Had a severely prolonged battle with the snooze alarm situation on my phone, eventually made it to a cafe to do my Portuguese homework, this was slightly marred by an unfortunate overpriced orange juice situation but I’ve been instructed not to dwell upon that any more.
Today I make a tiny prototype sculpture of big-butted visor wearing gym junkie, a half woman/half chicken sketch, some hairdo studies and got really obsessed drawing the same cranky face over and over again (see my instagram for the GRIPPING live coverage of this). I also made some photo collages using photographs of neighbourhood buildings and some old magazines. They made me chuckle out loud a lot so I think I’m going to go nuts on those, here’s a little clue as to why.
I went to a pole dancing class for the first time in one million years and it was wonderfully difficult because the teacher noticed all the things I was doing wrong and made me do them properly OMG whyyyyyyyyyyyy. But obviously that’s a good thing and I am planning to do a live performance online and want to incorporate pole dance into it so stay tuned for that!
AND now I am writing this blog and now I have finished because it’s getting late and I want to eat a peach and some chocolate.
xxxxx
Alice
It’s a sticky summer night at the Hindley st McDonalds. We are extra sticky having just taken a quick dip in the fountain outside the High Court on our meandering journey to get here. We feel classy for it, so classy in fact we deem it acceptable to enter McDonalds without our pants. We envision ourselves to be pulling off some kind of shocking but sexy Vivienne westwood punk aesthetic as we photograph ourselves posing at the counter. A few hours later we will sober up and lie in our beds sniggling because we weren’t even Courtney (Love).
The burgers taste so good we don’t even bother to lament how disgusting we are for coming here. Chris puts his fries in his burger. I inform him that ‘I just can’t get behind carbs sandwiched in carbs’
As we ponder double carbs our attention is drawn to the speed fuelled croaking and squawking of the sun damaged couple at the next table. The woman has tiny blond braids all over her head with gaudy, coloured beads attached to the ends. I silently call her a cocktail orange. I’ve never seen one but my dad once likened a fat little girl in Bali to one which had delighted me.
Our interest is instantly clocked,
‘Good burgies aye?’
Her voice gurgles like a wet ashtray and as soon as we look into her raisin eyes and politely second the notion, we are trapped. She minces her burgie in her thick hand and grins at us. Her counterpart has leant himself into the wall with a McChicken in each hand and a smile that sucks his features into the middle of his face.
We revert to our most polite selves, agreeing that the cops in Adelaide are so fucked. For real we all gotta get back to Victoria so we can be free! Paedophiles are truly fucked units, yep, yep, nah, yeah, nah they are fucked. They’re the worst actually.
A chunk of burgie goes flying as the cocktail orange gesticulates her disgust at pedos.
‘Aw shit! Me burgie!’
The retrieved chunk is the first morsel I have noticed her attempt to ingest. We learn that it’s fine to eat Hindley Maccas floor food because old mate Burgie ate prison floor eccies one time. Intrigued and out of our depth, we tap into our inner social workers and ask about the psychological impact of her incarceration experience. Her family has been torn apart by drugs, abuse and recidivism. McChicken comes to life as we offer sympathetic observations about cycles of disadvantage. Burgie hasn’t seen her husband in years cos he’s in Yatala, fucking Adelaide cops. Chris is brave enough to ask what he’s in for and Burgie’s gurgled response is matter of fact.
‘Snowtown murders.’
We shriek in disbelief all the way back to the fountain and I tell Chris about cocktail oranges because he has never seen one before.
Loki and I had reluctantly left Brasil and embarked upon the world’s most disastrous bike tour on the Ruta 40, destination – Patagonia.
After ten million flat tires and one extremely tiring tantrum we found ourselves at a hostel in Bariloche. At the communal breakfast table some Australian travelers asked me, ‘have you guys had any incidents while you have been traveling?’ We had just been regaling them with the horrors of our bike trip told so we guessed they were probably wondering if we had been scammed or robbed or seen anything a bit full on.
‘Well, in Belo Horizonte I bought a pair of denim shorts that I thought were going to be $20 AUS but they were like $45, that was devastating. I was in a black mood for hours.’
Bleak.
If someone were to ask us that today we would tell them the following tale.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Loki and I had been in El Bolson for a week and it was our first day as a gang of four now that Ruby and Johnny had joined us. We were feeling fine and the weather was glorious, the sun was shining and we wanted to walk to the river for a swim and to discuss our route to the deep south of Argentina and Chile. Ruby and Johnny had just put a deposit down on a Combi, the first stop would be Puerto Varas, Chile to collect the fabulous yellow beast.
Loki and I had already checked out the local mirador as recommended by the tourist map as well as the nearby overnight hike to the glacier. On our first venture into these woods we had seen cops armed with AK47s wandering in the bushes.
As the four of us walked up the road to the Rio Azul we passed two heavily armed police who smiled and pleasantly greeted us ‘Que tal?’
We strolled down the bush path running alongside the dirt road and played ‘who am I?’ in Spanish. We heard someone running down the road, as we looked to our right we saw a sweaty, wild-eyed guy dressed in a dark blue adidas tracksuit zoom past us. Ruby noted that it looked like he was carrying a big knife, ‘that’s a bit worrying’ someone said, but we carried on.
The path came to a little clearing and I decided I wanted to walk on the road again, the grass was itching my feet. As we filed off the path I noticed the man in the tracksuit approaching us on the bush path several metres ahead.
Suddenly we were all standing on the road. The wild-eyed man was brandishing a machete in one hand and a small glinting knife in the other. Whenever I reflect on the image of the small knife in his hand I can hear Johnny’s words in my head, ‘That small knife is the one you want to look out for, the machete is all for show.’ Despite having a clear view of his face minutes earlier when he trundled past us, he had opted to cover his face in a bandana. I imagined how I might try to describe him to the police,
“Uhhh… ele tem pelo negro, y ele e um moreno. Tem piel moreno y olhos locos! Y ele veste roupas todas Adidas azul!”
Not only would I be speaking a very basic and muddled version of both Spanish and Portuguese, I would also be describing a large proportion of the Argentinian population.
The Adidas Bandit was terrifying, like a martial arts character out of a 90’s playstation game come to life. He made some kind of demand I didn’t understand and seemed to be gesturing with both knives that he wanted us to lie on the ground.
‘I think he wants us to lie down?’ I asked no one in particular.
It occurred to me that he was probably going to murder all of us because he was clearly a sporty psychopath. I’ve always loved reading true crime stories about nutters who bonk around cutting folk up, and in this moment I realized that it was my time to face a crazed serial killer and action one of the hypothetical escape plans I had been working on my whole life.
He just wanted our mochilas.
Loki had obviously done some quick calculations and with his knowledge of my physical abilities had recognized that not only was I a fairly slow ‘sprinter’ at the best of times, I was also wearing thongs and on a gravel road.
I heard the instruction,
‘Alice, run.’
Terrified and overwhelmed with images of this fashionable Adidas Bandit brutalising my friends with a machete, I kicked off my pink flip flops and trundled away. I felt like I’d never run so slowly in my life. As a child I came last in the 100 metre sprints every single year, except one time, a lanky, flat footed type called Briony Walkman managed to out-slow me and I proudly crossed the finish line second last.
I kept waiting for an adrenaline rush to turn me into a super human but it never seemed to come. Every time I turned around to see what was going on/check that no one had been butchered yet Loki would notice the seconds wasted and shout some encouragement,
‘Keep going little fella’.
Ruby was trying to negotiate with the bandit and I could hear the boys yelling in panic, they were throwing money at him and urging Ruby to run. Meanwhile, I plodded up the hill maintaining a steady cry of ‘yyyaaaarrrrrraaaaaaaagggggffhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!’
Johnny recalled that by the time he had turned around to run I was already so far up the road, staggering up the hill barefoot in my citrus patterned bike shorts. He seemed to find the image quite comical despite the danger. Loki, Ruby and Johnny caught up to me and overtook me with ease. I stopped panicking about being the last person to be murdered and realized I might actually be the first victim!
In primary school, after the Port Arthur shootings happened I developed my first strategy for escaping murderers. In this particular scenario, I’d always felt it would be wise to lie on the ground as soon as gun shots started happening and pretend be dead already. Flawless. So far, my painfully lethargic ascent of the hill inspired had only one escape plan other than ‘outrun the bandit’. I peered over edge of the road where the earth dropped suddenly and there were brambles everywhere. Worst case scenario, I would leap off the edge and roll a couple of hundred metres down the hill, land deep in the brambles and hide. Flawless.
We made it to the top of a particularly steep hill and the bandit finally seemed to have given up on the world’s slowest pursuit. He stood at the bottom of the hill making a big show of pretending to sharpen his knives.
We all collapsed through the gate of a local family’s yard. As they came out to investigate the gringo situation on their driveway they seemed to know immediately what had happened. Johnny started giving everyone water from his water-sack backpack. As I sat in the dirt wheezing and coughing up dust I considered purchasing a water dispensing backpack. No wonder the bandit was so keen on our backpacks.
We discovered EVERYONE in El Bolson seemed to know about that notorious stretch of road. The guy who ran our campsite was horrified that we had even ventured out that way,
‘Everyone gets robbed on that road!’
Great, thanks everyone.
Why did the folk in the tourist centre never mention it?
Why did the cops we passed fail to pass on a warning?
What the hell El Bolson?
Every time I hear about Trump I am reminded of this terribly disappointing woman I encountered at Confest.
The river at the festival site had flooded just before the hordes of hippies arrived.
This meant there were excellent opportunities for swimming and mosquito breeding.
The mosquitos were relentless and endless. As the sun rose and set, gazillions of mosquitos would appear and savagely attack any exposed skin they could find. Loki earned himself the nickname venom face because he was so red and lumpy. Some of us fashioned mozzie cloaks out of hippie flavoured material.
One morning as we wandered into the centre of the gathering we passed naked, mosquito ravaged, old bearded dudes snoozing in the foetal position in the grass. After a few days of bloodshed we decided to hit up the medical tent for whatever they could offer. They offered bug repellant and everyone wanted in on it. As we gathered round patiently waiting our turn to spray ourselves with mega chemicals one enterprising dreadlocker had an extremely efficient idea. She hearded us all into a circle and stood in the middle. She sprayed our bare feet and ordered us to rotate slowly like roasting chickens as she slowly worked her way up our bodies covering us in toxic mist. Around mid thigh of our delightful community activity a darked haired woman pushed into the circle and demanded in an authoritative tone that she needed to borrow the spray for just a moment. She proceeded to snatch the can and spray her whole body greedily. She was dancing around in a panicked frenzy as she sprayed, breathing heavily like a concentrating three year old. With a big sigh of relief she handed the can back to our group and wandered off.
“Scratch a hippie, smell a fascist” – this was Will’s mantra for most of Confest. He was already repeating it before we had even arrived.
“Scratch a hippie, smell a fascist I always say. Lets stop here for a sausage roll.”
Mouth full of sausage roll, chocolate donut on his lap and one elbow on the steering wheel,
“Tell you what, scratch a hippie, smell a fascist, you mark my words.”
Trump always makes me think of that bad hippie except I assume that if she were to give a speech she might make sense.
