Hello everybody. Welcome to AA.
My name is Bea. And I’m an artist.
We’re often told that art is not important. That it’s fluffy, insubstantial, esoteric. That it has no value — economically, educationally, intellectually. Successive governments have eroded the arts (and culture) over a long period of time, pulling funding, removing art from education (think STEM vs STEAM) and now abolishing the Department of Communications and the Arts. We are constantly told that to be an artist is not a ‘real job’ or a ‘proper’, fitting vocation as it does not contribute in a meaningful way to society or the GDP.
It’s very difficult to be an artist and a creative spirit in such an actively hostile and depressing environment.
But I would argue that now, more than ever, we need art. Art is subversive, it is didactic, it challenges us to think differently, to view the world through a different lens and to question the rigidity of the status quo. Art is a powerful tool in promoting and driving change, and in imagining ‘different’ — or better. Art brings us critical and creative thinking tools, without which humanity would not have evolved to the state we have. Critical and creative thinking are the basis for innovation, imagination and problem solving. And art brings people together, both in mindset and in experience.
I have been making and gifting miniature art cards for many years
Over the years, I have been inspired by many different artists and philosophies, and have built my art practice around four key principles: permission, experience, collaboration and participation. Personally I think these principles are key and very much needed right now to help society overcome our current problems and move forward with new, positive thinking.
As a young person, and very excited about choosing my subjects for year 9 in high school, I was devastated when my mother proclaimed, “No daughter of mine is going to become a bum, drop out artist” and forbade me from choosing art as a subject. And so permission was the first obstacle I needed to overcome in becoming an artist.
I spent my teens and 20’s being angry and trying desperately to ‘fit in’, to find my art voice and wanting to ‘be’ an artist. But I never felt like I was a ‘real’ artist because I didn’t have the right qualifications (whatever that meant) — I didn’t have a fixed medium or style, I was self-taught and therefore ‘not good enough’. My mother constantly badgered me to ‘get a real job’ despite having found my way into design and earning quite a good living from that. (I’d been ‘allowed’ to take a 1-unit photography subject in years 11 & 12 because it wasn’t seen as important or a threat to my HSC results — I got into design school on the strength of my photography portfolio.)
But design is not art and I desperately wanted to be an artist, a ‘real’ artist. I just didn’t know how to make that happen. I had no support or mentors to look up to, so I had to figure it out on my own.
Sometime in my mid-20’s, I came across a movement and art collective from the 1960’s called Fluxus. Fluxus included artists like John Cage and Yoko Ono. These artists were playing with experimental, conceptual and experiential art. It was radical and pioneering — people had never seen anything like it. It confused and in some cases polarised people by questioning what constituted art — what even was art? What was its purpose, its power? Fluxus, and its experiments in conceptual art, turned art on its head.
And it was transformative for me. These artists didn’t ask permission — they just went out and did crazy, random things in public that people didn’t expect. They didn’t have fixed mediums — they used whatever was needed to execute on the idea. Many of the ‘performances’ required audience participation and were immersive experiences.
“Like the Futurists and Dadaists before them, Fluxus artists did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the value of art, nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art. Fluxus not only wanted art to be available to the masses, they also wanted everyone to produce art all the time. The persistent goal of most Fluxus artists was to destroy any boundary between art and life.”
This helped me to remove permission as an obstacle. And I loved the idea of experiential, participatory art. But I still wasn’t sure how to execute on my ideas or how to do the things I imagined doing as a team of one. I wasn’t part of a collective, I wasn’t surrounded by other like-minded artists. I craved a movement, collaboration and opportunities to learn from and share with others. So I moved to Newtown, which in the 1990’s was an eclectic hub for artists, musicians and creative thinkers. It felt like coming home.
Shortly afterwards, I met a man who not only gave me permission, he enabled me to realise my dreams and execute on my visions. He’s been my partner in crime ever since — my wonderful husband, Adam.
Artistic license, made for me by Adam
In the late 90’s, I was involved in a number of art collectives — ArtCore, Loveseat and Clan Analogue. While each of these collectives were largely focused on electronic music and dance parties, they provided me with a platform and opportunities to explore subcultures and the convergence of music, art, performance and multimedia. This is where my explorations in conceptual, experiential art installations began.
One of our early installation pieces was an interactive, technological work called the Forest of Communication, which we executed at the Summer Dreaming festival at Peats Ridge in 2001. Heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s theories of the ‘medium is the message’ and ‘hot v’s cold media’, and drawing on the notions of ‘push v’s pull’ media, I wanted to explore what would happen if a typically cool medium were inverted and made hot. How would reversing the intended use of a communication device make people feel? What would happen if a technology medium gained sentience?
With this concept in mind, we took a trip to Reverse Garbage in Marrickville to see what we could find. Right from the beginning, all of my artworks operated with $0 budget and were built purely from recycled / upcycled / found materials. It was important to me that the works had both a meaningful message and the smallest possible carbon footprint — that they practiced what they preached.
We found a sack of old Telstra handsets, a sack of literal ‘cans of worms’, old TV’s and large PVC piping tubes. Serendipitous! And so with our awesome finds, we created an artificial environment, wired to subvert communication.
The phones were located in an artificial ‘forest’ made of technology — large plastic tubing ‘trees’ (standing upright in the ground over star pickets), a ‘canopy’ of cable wiring, technological ‘growths’ and piles of gutted televisions spawning ‘fungus’ (in the form of empty ‘cans of worms’) littering the ‘forest floor’. Each ‘tree’ had a parasitic handset on its trunk.
The audience was invited to participate, but in this environment, the phones did not behave the way people expected them to, nor were they able to use them the way they were used to using them. Instead of being able to use the phone for personal expression or to communicate their own messages, the phones were pushing their own messages at the user, forcing us to ‘listen’ to the phones’ expression.
Each phone transmitted a low quality, looped sound recording, deliberately designed to sound like transient, whispered messages. The initial impression was one of accidental voyeurism into a crossed-line conversation. But the phones continued to whisper their subliminal message in an attempt to infiltrate out consciousness and perhaps influence our thoughts.
Technology at the time was not as advanced as it is now — MP3’s were a brand new thing. Mobile tech was rudimentary. The canopy of wiring all led back to a computer in the boot of our car, which Adam had pulled off with his technological magic, and pushed random MP3 soundtracks from advertising, radio shows, evangelical TV shows and book readings to the phones.
It was all very 1984. Ironic really, given where communication tech is now.
com-mun-i-cate installation piece performed Summer Dreaming Festival, Peats Ridge, January 2001
This was my first successful foray into permissive, experiential, participatory and collaborative large scale art. I was hooked — but it would be the last such work I would create in this style for many years. My son was born in 2002, and I put art aside — for some reason I thought I had to grow up and ‘adult’; art didn’t seem to figure in that narrative.
Thankfully, I was very very wrong. As my kids grew up, creativity, art and music were essential elements in all of our lives. As a family, we have explored animation, robotics, costume making, sculpture, song writing, blacksmithing and performance art. We are now creating large scale performance artworks together.
When my children were little, I moved from design into teaching interactive media at Raffles College of Design and Commerce in North Sydney, where I did teacher training and spent the next 10 years (off and on) teaching from VET to Masters level. During this time, I was inspired by the educational philosophy and approach of the Bauhaus school (1919–1933, Germany) and I adapted my teaching style to be a more collaborative, practical, mentoring and problem-based approach. I found that, despite everything people had said to the contrary, creativity could be taught — and very successfully — using this method.
“The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art — sculpture, painting, handicrafts and the crafts — as inseparable components of a new architecture. The ultimate aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art — the great structure — in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art.”
― Gropius, W, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program”, 1919 https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bauh/hd_bauh.htm
This was the catalyst for us to find a school that taught creative and critical thinking from a young age, using a mentoring, problem-based learning approach. Which is how our children ended up at Kinma for their preschool and primary years (and why we moved from Newtown to the Northern Beaches of Sydney).
But coming back into ‘being’ an artist again when my children were primary school aged, after having put it aside for so long, brought up all those same old fears and insecurities. Two things were instrumental in me overcoming these obstacles (again) and allowing myself to start creating: Amanda Palmer and the art of Burning Man.
I’d known about Burning Man and the amazing, large scale artworks executed there for some time. I fell in love with the 10 principles as soon as I read them (and we’ve tried to live a version of them as a family ever since.) And I was so very inspired by the wild and imaginative installation artworks executed in the middle of the desert, and the art philosophy that went with that.
“Burning Man is a revival of art’s culture-bearing and connective function. It is art that is meant to be touched, handled, played with and moved through in a public arena. It solicits a collaborative response from its audience, even as it encourages collaboration between artists. It deliberately blurs the distinction between audience and art form, professional and amateur, spectator and participant. Burning Man is art that’s generated by a way of life, and it seeks, at its broadest aim, to reclaim realms of politics, nature, history, ritual and myth for the practice of art. This is art within a Utopian agenda.”
― Larry Harvey, Burning Man: Art on Fire
There it was again — permission, experience, collaboration and participation. It kick-started the process of re-discovering myself as an artist and I was itching to be able to pull off such grand visions.
But for me, it was the same old problem — I’m a team of one (well 2 at the time), these things take a lot of effort, budget and time. We’d need a team, and a platform. I didn’t feel it was feasible to be producing large artworks, shipping them the USA and attending Burning Man with two small children. So I created smaller scale works and experimented with different mediums for a few years, but I had a strong sense of dissatisfaction: I wasn’t the artist I wanted to be — yet.
Then I found Amanda Palmer.
“There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking?language=en
When I read Amanda Palmer’s book “The Art of Asking” 5 years ago, I felt like shouting YES! at just about every. Single. Page. It was an enormously validating and liberating experience – it was the catalyst that broke down the final barriers and encouraged me to just do art rather than try to ‘be’ an artist. If you haven’t read Amanda’s book “The Art of Asking” or watched her TED talk — do it. It will change your life.
A few years before I read Amanda Palmer’s book, we’d heard about Burning Seed, a smaller, local version of Burning Man. Our good friends went along one year to check it out and came back so inspired, they decided to start their own small, private version of it. And so Wild Yam was born. 2019 was the 7th year of Wild Yam.
When my father died in 2015, I’d been invited to participate in a group public exhibition, called Art Carnival, in Avalon. I was halfway through making a large scale interactive installation — my first since the Forest of Communication. But it lost all meaning for me after dad passed away and I didn’t — couldn’t — continue. So I pulled out of the exhibition and sat with my grief and the 12 sculptures I had created for several months, wondering what I could do to honour my dad with meaning. For my birthday that year, I was given a book called The Art of Burning Man. I was very taken with the temple spaces built at the festival — and with the idea behind them. But what really got me was the story of how the idea had come about in the first place. The first temple was built as a tribute to honour one of the founders, who had tragically died in an accident while setting up for Burning Man one year.
And so the Wild Temple of Yam was manifested into being. Initially, it was built as a tribute to my father, but the idea quickly morphed to become a non-denominational, open and inclusive space for contemplation, reflection, meditation, spirituality and remembrance by everyone in the community.
Wild Temple of Yam: Doorhenge in it’s original, virginal configuration
The concept was to recreate the original temple — Stonehenge — in a quirky form as Doorhenge. Once again, the temple was built with $0 budget, and all materials were recycled or found. Serendipitously, 15 free doors appeared on Gumtree, along with 12 free 44-gallon drums. I envisaged that between each door, standing atop the barrels, would be a template guardian.
I adapted the 12 sculptures to become a set of temple guardians, each one representing a human archetype as a display of unity and tolerance in circle, symbolising that we are all one. The guardians were created from papier-mache and chicken wire, which involved some small purchase costs (baking paper is 40c / roll from Aldi!). The main cost was in the paint and waterproof sealer to protect the guardians while standing in the paddock.
Visitors to the temple were invited to write or paint on the doors, leave a message, drawing, poem, prayer or memorial, or simply sit in the space. The temple atmosphere changed and came alive as people wrote on the doors and used the space.
Wild Temple of Yam: Spirit Figures, Yamazon, 2018
As the festival is an all-ages event, with participants from 0–80 attending, safety while people interacted with it was paramount. The doors and sculptures were secured so that they wouldn’t fall if people climbed on them or knocked them, or if there was an unexpected wind storm. Adam was the engineering brains behind the project, developing a method for making the doors stand upright safely in the field and creating a solar panel and truck battery powered lighting rig to light up the temple at night.
Each year, the configuration is slightly different, and the symbolism of the ‘guardians’ changes. In 2019, the configuration was ‘Starway to heaven’ — the doors were configured into a 7-pointed star — and the ‘guardians’ were white sheets, each one painted with a representative symbol from different faiths around the world, as a display of unity and tolerance in circle, symbolising that all faiths are equally valid and important.
Wild Temple of Yam: Starway to Heaven, GodYam, 2019
The temple is a much loved space. It has a fire in the centre and has been used during the festival for ceremonies, workshops, a funeral celebration, a wedding, women’s circles, secret men’s business, singing and songwriting. Unlike Burning Man temples, it is not burnt at the end of the festival, but is cumulative and built on each year by festival participants. I enjoy that people enjoy reading what they wrote in previous years and evaluating how far they’ve come or changed since then. People often build on their previous messaging or change it to reflect their journey now.
My most recent project, Catbus, was the first one to involve a (small) budget and to use non-recycled materials — it’s difficult to ‘find’ faux fur in such a quantity and to provide consistency in the appearance, so the fur was purchased. The chassis was built using traditional Chinese dragon puppetry techniques and is made from reclaimed bamboo and electrical conduit.
Catbus at Ironfest: Once Upon a Time, 2019
Catbus, based on a character from the Studio Ghibli movie, ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, was built as a 4-person puppet costume for our family to cosplay as street performers at Ironfest 2019, with the Ironfest Furries & Characters. It’s only real purpose and meaning is to bring joy to people — but it is a lot of fun. We received a grant to take Catbus to Burning Seed: Zoomorphism as an ‘art car’, and so we finally got to realise our dream of attending a burn event! And it too felt like coming home.
You can follow the adventures of Catbus on Facebook and read more about the making of Catbus on Medium.
We came home from Burning Seed very inspired, hooked on both the lifestyle and philosophy and with a burning desire to create something on a larger, grander scale. In 2020, we are looking to create our most ambitious project to date — a large mutant vehicle that ‘walks’ and doubles as a musical performance space: the Lost Machinery of Life… Thing! At this stage, it is nothing more than a thought bubble, but we already have more than 30 people interested in collaborating and being involved, which is very exciting.
“This was the machinery of life, not a clean, clinical well-oiled engine, monitored by a thousand meticulous dials, but a crazy, stumbling contraption made up of strange things roughly fitted together.”
– Margaret Mahy, from Memory
I love seeing how my career skills and my art practice are merging. I have been an experience designer and innovation coach for several years now — one of the things I love about this is that when young, as a wild creative thinker, I was often told by men in suits that I was too ‘out there’ and needed to be ‘reigned in’, to play the game and conform. Now my job is to teach men in suits to think like me in order to be more creative and innovative in how they solve the big problems of the world. Wicked!
These days, I can confidently stand up and say that I AM an artist. As an artist, I am medium fluid — I don’t have a fixed medium; the medium is whatever is the most suitable for executing the idea. This means that I often don’t have the skills or know-how to pull off an idea when it first hatches, and I need to learn those skills in order to realise the vision. For me, this is one of the most exciting parts of the process.
I want to continue to bring my skills together to help us build richer, larger and more meaningful awesomeness. One of my goals for 2020 is to build an art community (family!). This new idea will be far bigger than the four of us, and will require a collaborative effort. Many new skills will need to be learnt and I want to be able to share both the learning and creative effort with others, young, old and everywhere in between. I believe everyone has a role to play and ideas to contribute, and I also believe that everyone is an artist when they say they are.
I’m imagining that this project will evolve into a kind of organic learning co-op-come-art-collective as we work out how to best execute this totally mad idea. There are many challenges to overcome, including funding, housing, building and transportation. I want to ensure there is a focus on sustainability, low carbon footprint and meaningful purpose. I want to bring together a range of diverse perspectives and skills to see how together, we can evolve and bring to life an awesome, didactic, creative, showcase endeavour that can inspire people and challenge the ‘best’ way to do things.
So if you’re an artist too and would like to join the Lost Machinery of Life… Thing! artistic adventure, please join the Facebook group, make yourself known and meet the other collaborators. Let’s get creative and inspire people together!
Initial concept sketch for the Lost Machinery of Life… Thingy!
The Artful Bea 