Paper cuts
My first week in the studio is spent sun-bleaching paper. My pickings from the tip include a stack of red printing paper, a roll of newsprint paper and several pieces of card. I am keen to explore paper extensively, especially since it changes colour so rapidly in the sun compared to fabric, plastic and other materials.
Paper airplanes, flip photo albums, multi photo frames, an open book, stencils from household objects – these are some of the objects I experiment with.
I decide to leave them outside over night to avoid handling them more often than necessary. Naturally, it rains for the first time since I’ve been here leaving a sorry looking display of limp, sodden pulp for me to return to the next morning. I repeat everything I’ve done and brace myself for another stretch of obscenely hot afternoons.
Bin diving
I meet with Bevan Honey (he could only be Australian), an established artist who has shown extensively in Australia. He is also the residency co-ordiantor at the Arts Centre and shows me around. Bevan drives a Chrysler Valiant Safari which puts my $700 Toyota Crown to shame, tidy as it is. Classic cars are not treasured here like they are back at home (there are more of them for a start), still I am rather fond of the Crown and any vehicle that will attract such rowdy encouragement on the freeway has my vote.
Bevan shows me the studio that he has in mind for my project, the Green Shed Studio. It is much larger than anything I am used to, attached to the caretaker’s workshop and has an attractive, shady lawn surrounding it. There is a sunlit space behind the shed where I can leave work in progress, undisturbed by the morning sprinklers. There is also a warning sign stating that Redback spiders have been spotted in the area. The Redback is a poisonous beast, docile unless disturbed yet nevertheless a creature whose bite requires urgent medical attention. Having lived and worked on a cattle station for the last two months I am familiar with the Redback so know, thankfully, the kind of spaces she might be lurking in.
The impending residency feels more real than ever now, and I am in urgent need of materials. The next week or so I come across a fair amount of hard rubbish left out on the verge. In contacting Fremantle Council, I find that the following weekend there will be a hard rubbish drop off point a little drive out of town where a number of skips will be provided for residents to dump their unwanted goods. This opportunity is just what I am after and a happy Saturday is spent moseying around the skips plucking out bits of junk with potential.
Even if I dont use half of these things, there is something comforting about having stuff around you in the workspace. Ever cleared out your studio and sat between four blank walls on a floor that seems to stretch on forever and wondered what the dickens you are going to make now? I’ve been there. So, it’s nice to have some friends, albeit in the form of light fittings and flower pots.
First impressions
Sun, sea, wealth: it’s all here in excess. Freo (that’s Fremantle to us Pommies) is a small city that sits just south of Perth on the west coast of Australia. By morning it bakes in the blinding light of the sun, yet is tempered at three in the afternoon by a punctual and cooling breeze from the ocean, fondly nicknamed the Fremantle Doctor.
Fremantle has a reputation as a lefty, liberal, anything goes sort of place yet its bohemian days appear to be dwindling, if the reams of fancy cafes selling tall-skinny-lattes-with-extra-froth are anything to go by. The Arts Centre, located centrally, is really quite beautiful. Set on a historic site that was once WA’s first mental asylum built in the mid nineteenth century, its spacious, leafy, sun-dappled setting is at odds with its no doubt dark and turbulent history. My first impressions of the place leave me feeling very lucky to be affiliated with such a lively and long-standing organization.
My work has often had a time-based aspect to it whereby physical changes take place within a work, either during an exhibition or prior to it. My proposal for the residency, sent from my freezing studio in Hackney Wick, was to exploit the bright, white sunlight of WA to explore the effects of the sun on found objects and materials.
A much welcomed date in the Australian calendar (which varies according to one’s suburb or town) is Hard Rubbish Day, when residents leave their unwanted goods out on the verge to be collected. This means bin junkies like me have a field day. Given that the treasures left out on the street more often than not include perfectly functioning, quality electrical goods there is money to be made, but that is another story. I plan to make work using the things that I find in the hard rubbish collection, exploring the influence of sunlight on objects that are neglected or unwanted.
