Love[f]Art #13 | Mia Boe

Hosted by Amanda Love, the LoveArt podcast brings listeners into direct conversation with contemporary artists, extending the work of the independent art advisory, LoveArt, based in Sydney, New York and Athens.

The series draws from Love[f]Art, LoveArt’s ongoing program of intimate, in-conversation recordings with artists, originally conceived in 2020. Filmed in the most unlikely of settings—the guest powder room at the Love residence—the project strips things back to a one-to-one exchange, focusing on ideas, process and the conditions that shape contemporary practice.

This episode features Mia Boe's Dream Room, a direct wall painting and installation of small canvas works. Boe is a Melbourne-based painter from Brisbane with Butchulla and Burmese ancestry. Her work is influenced by the inheritance and ‘disinheritance’ of these two cultures, often responding to Empire’s deliberate and violent interferences with the cultural heritages of Burma/Myanmar and K’gari (Fraser Island).

Recorded in August 2024, at the time of the work’s installation, the conversation offers a direct insight into the thinking behind the piece, and the broader concerns that underpin her practice.

Boe is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.

Additional information, including the video version of this podcast, is available here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the 13th iteration of Love Art's nano project, Love for Art, where we continue to multitask our minigus paddle room as a Bois de Valise, countering the increasing size and complexity of much institutional contemporary practice with explorations of a different size. Here, on Gadigall Land, so respects to the AOA Nation, we investigate the tiny and the one-to-one, to showcase the strength of current artistic expression, which is, by necessity, innovative and ingenious. I'm Amanda Love, and it's my great pleasure to introduce our latest site-specific installation, Dream Room, by Brisbane-born rapidly emerging artist Mia Bo, who currently lives and works in Melbourne, where she draws on her butchelor and Burmese ancestry to create intriguing, visually precise artworks populated with elongated, stick-like figures, animals and objects that float, morph, and shape-shift their way through flat, colour-saturated landscapes or highly stylized worlds, where her personal narratives intertwine with those of others she's unearthed and reconstituted. You could find her extended biography on our website. Welcome me out. Not from your Melbourne studio. I actually thought you might be at Rosen Oxley Gallery putting the finishing captures on your first show there, which opens tonight.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

I'm in a hotel in Sydney in the Darlinghurst, Paddington area. All right. Yeah.

unknown 1:49

Well.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Congratulations on both shows. Thank you. I'm in the dream room.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

So we'll get straight into it because I mean your work is often and sometimes quite confoundingly described as both an inheritance and a disinheritance of your Burmese and Butular cultural heritage. And for those that don't know, Butchelor is from Gari, which was formerly Fraser Island. And so I thought to start, you might tell us a bit about your growing up amidst these two influences as a context for your current creative um and of course social focus.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah, so I guess I I like to use both the words inheritance and disinheritance because although my parents and ancestors are from these cultures, I didn't grow up um necessarily with a lot of cultural information in terms of traditional information or language. And that's for two reasons. My dad came to Australia when he was a young child, um, escaping sort of the dictatorship regime of Burma. Um, and then my mum, you know, after consequences of Stolen Generation and other practices in Australia, she didn't grow up on much of the country. She grew up in far north Queensland and then eventually lived in Brisbane. So I like to sort of acknowledge this disconnection from culture in some ways, but also surrounded by sort of, you know, the way I the way I look and uh my community, and um, but yeah, just sort of being very upfront that there's the way of accessing knowledge is not through sort of traditional forms of family or oral history, it's through books and my own research as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

I understand that that you while you studied art history, your primary self-taught as an artist. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Yes, I um attempted art school twice, but I found that the art schools I was going to took a more of a conceptual sort of teaching method rather than uh technique-based. And um yeah, and I just thought I could just I think I I literally just like bought paints and just tried it. I mean, I did an art in high school and I had a really amazing art teacher, Miss Colwill, who was like gave us the route right amount of um encouragement, but also didn't, I don't know, try to mold you in any sort of way um into just showed us artists we might like. And um, yeah, and I just went for it. I think also growing up in Brisbane, I was going to a lot of shows by contemporary indigenous artists that were using painting as their sort of um way of storytelling, and not a lot of them were sort of formally taught, like going to shows by Richard Bell and Gordon Bennett, um, who did go to art school and Judy Watson and etc. Good and hooky. And so I just was like taking in this in.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

So um aren't we all lucky for our high school art teachers? I can remember Mrs. Holmes, mine as well. Honestly, I feel like I trade on everything I learned in and in not having I've done a master's, but you know, what I learned in high school, it went a long way. Anyway, before we get to Dream Room, uh let's flip quickly through some elements of your formative practice. Uh so for instance, in 2021, age just 24, and on the basis of the work we can see here, Call to Arms, which was created actually the year before in 2020, you were selected as one of only five recipients of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, which is a two-week residency at Shark Island Camp on Kangaroo Island. Now, I focus on this very early work because I think even here we can see the hallmarks of your visually acute style and way of nuanced messaging. And on looking at it, and and I just wanted to ask on, you know, when I also want to look at it given the timing, I wondered whether it contains double reference to the COVID lockdowns as well as a broader political imperative, or if it meant something more specific to you.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

No, yeah, definitely. So I made this work, yeah, in 2020. I was in lockdown in Melbourne. I just moved there uh weeks before lockdowns. And um it was exactly, and it was also during um or just after all the protests at Black Lives Matter around the world, and there was a sort of this overwhelming feeling of helplessness being in lockdowns while watching these like you know, amazing protests going on around the world. And there was there were some protests in Melbourne, but you still you still felt extremely helpless. So yeah, I think in a lot of my works on that year, there were a lot of bars because it was you're referencing not just the prison system, but also this literal feeling of locked in your home. Um, and then the text there is from a song Um Black Fella, White Fella by Warum Pand, uh, which is a band we would listen to growing up at home. So this original work I turned into posters, and there was for a project with the Institute of Modern Art. Um, and the that project was called Making Art Work, and they commissioned lots of artists that had a connection to Brisbane to make me work. Um and so I made two paintings, this one and another painting that had a quote by Gordon Bennett, and I turned them into posters and plastered them up around West End in Brisbane. Um so yeah, there's lots of different influences, but totally, yeah, lockdown.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

It's such a terrific example of the way your work combines a disarming simplicity of form with complex and multi-textured meanings and references. And I think it's a talent which plays out in a different way in the work you made later that same year, which was 2021, when you were included in On the Bank, on the Brink at Murray Art Museum, Norbury, where along with I think the contemporary sculpture Phil Murray, your um, shall we say, joint point of departure was the work of Tommy McRae, whose 19th century drawings depicted the first intersection between traditional and cultural and columnial culture. I wondered whether you'd known previously of these truth-telling drawings as part of your general research, or was a discovery of some kind of thrilling moment of recognition in terms of your own practice and how you could work with them?

SPEAKER_01 8:46

I can't remember when I had heard about him, but I I believe I studied him in my art history degree um a few years prior. And I I saw I kind of um I'm a big fan of the drawings by Bill Trailer as well. He was an African-American artist um who was born in slavery and did quite similar style drawings of depicting life in America. Um, and yeah, it was such an honor. When Beth Thornburg, the curator, approached me, I was super excited. I got to see all these um drawings that were in their collection, and she took me to like around Wadonga and um Wangarata area where Tommy was from and took me to the the lakes that his family um used to live and read a lot of these drawings. I'm guessing we're set. So yeah, that was a really exciting um project because I doing art history and referencing a lot of art history in my paintings. I I like when people ask me to sort of bounce off them and be very direct with them.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

All right, because I was going to be asking that question. I was going to say, you know, as it was the first kind of more curated group exhibition, um, and you had a constraint, I was how, you know, how did how did it work for you? But it obviously was very successful.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Yeah, I kind of um the way I I didn't I find I remember my thinking back then, how I approached the project, but I wanted to go off sort of the main things in a lot of his work, which was family, um, and the paintings I made for the exhibition were sort of we'll look at those actually, because I don't actually though look at two, we've got two spec examples here.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Um when I look at the works from the exhibition, we can see here I think the ashes were buried under the tree and the nostalgia of mother and child. To me, here it's if the landscape plays its own equal character in what are otherwise highly narrative works can take recognize now as specific and per your specific and quite personal lexicon of players and motives, or is the landscape just a stage here?

SPEAKER_01 11:11

It's an interesting question because I was um thinking about the CLA about how my landscapes, you know, I'm trying at one at sometimes I'm referencing specific places, but generally they are this idea of a landscape, and I think that comes from not growing up on country, um, not having a strong connection to sort of uh ancestral location. So I think it's sort of um yeah, definitely has its sort of own characteristics as this barren, sort of mystical sort of landscape with um, like with this one in particular, that the nostalgia of mother and child, the colour of the sort of sandy ground is referencing the sand hills of Gari. And um the other painting with the desert landscape, that sort of a colour scheme I reference a lot. It's just sort of this idea of the Australian outback and its barrenness. Um and uh yeah, then like the stories I put into it are a lot like at this time where I was making them, there's a lot of grief in my family. And we buried some ashes under a tree at this property that my family co-owns on Vingeraba, Strabbrook Island. So I have very lot of specific personal references in this these paintings because I wanted to sort of match that earnestness of Tommy McRae's works as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Well, um, the following year, which is 2022, you were included in Making Place, which is a hundred views of Brisbane at the Museum of Brisbane, and you exhibited the work Diary Means Paradise in Bachelor, which is another work early at work from 2020. And as you were talking about place, I would have thought this exhibition clearly provided an opportunity for you to speak directly to your butchelor heritage and hope what you've now, you know, your patient work of recovery and tracing historical trauma and violence, or investigating untold or underrepresented in indigenous stories, and doing so opening up new perspectives on current sites and circumstances. But here, the landscape in terms of place is it's almost confined. It's reduced and there's hardly any horizon, the trees are dead, it's red hot with a fan, providing the only breeze, and the oxygen seems solely for the narrative of a very westernized kit. So what are you saying here is it the flames of westernization or tourism that's being fair?

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Well, it it's interesting is I made this painting without it without knowing it was going to go on this exhibition. Um so it was just after the sort of bushfires, the insane bushfires in Australia in 2020. And so I think uh just fire and destruction was on the mind when I was thinking about the Australian landscape. Um and I this painting feels like such an old version of me, even though it was only four years ago. Um, but I like the flowers that that person's holding sitting down are oriental lilies, and they're my mum's favorite flowers. We both grow up having them in our house, you know, once a month, the freshly flower drop. So I was really interested during this time of looking at these ideas of nostalgia on a landscape that is I don't have direct contact with or connection to, and it's this feeling of loss, but also of trying to find connection to something and then also looking at the reality of a lost connection of and imagined sort of connections as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Right. Well, I think you're very right to say it feels like an old painting, even though it was two years ago, because you've had you've packed a lot in, I can tell you with the couple of years. And last year, for instance, we're still up to 2023. Um, uh, you were in identity at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. And there you worked much more directly with a story from your your own personal ancestry, which was of the native tracker Jack Noble or Wanamata, Wanamuta, who was, I believe, was one of the native police troopers who pursued Ned Kelly and the were black tracker. Again, here, no horizon, no archetypal Australian landscape. There's just a character play which is completely alienated from the land as a context. I thought you could could you take us through this, which is highly emotive but visually engaging work?

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Yeah, so um I I found out about this ancestor of mine, Jack Noble, um, Wanamada, that um just threw an I think it was like an ABC article about the history of native policing in Queensland. And then I recognized the name and then it's Butler, and um that's also and that's this was in 2020, and this was sort of my introduction to this history of the very, very violent practice of native police work. And um, so these three panels that tell the story very simply tell the story of my ancestor, sort of the before, during, and after of being a black tracker or pol uh native police officer. On his death certificate, it says occupation, black tracker. So that's where I got the title from. And um for people who don't know, the history of the native police was it happened all over Australia, and I only really know much about the Queensland sort of chapter, which lasted for about 50 years, from about 1850 to 1900. And there's not a lot of records, but it's estimated that at least 45,000 Aboriginal people were killed at the hands of Aboriginal police officers who were ordered by white officers. And it's a yeah, incredibly dark history that I was very surprised I didn't know about. I wasn't taught about at school. Um, and it's sort of dispelling this myth that colonization was, I don't know, um, less violent than it was. Um and the first panel is um referencing that the his story in particular, but it was a common practice that people would take teenage boys from their communities to turn them into black trackers. They would take them, you know, hundreds of kilometres from home so that they couldn't escape, they couldn't, they weren't killing anyone of kin. And if they tried to escape, they would um be hunted down themselves. So he was taken from Gari when he was, I think it's 14. So I've painted some dingos from Gary in the pink and then the sand dune colour again in the background colour. And then in the second panel, um Dawn of the Brown background, that's so there's actually quite a lot of photos of him online, archival photos, because of yeah, his he did help track down Ned Kelly in Victoria in the late 19th century. So I've done a little representation of uh Ned Kelly in the top corner that sort of looks like Sidney Nolan's version with the helmet, but I've done my sort of style of lanky body, and the little sort of bit like um story to the left there is taken from a painting I did uh in 2020 as well, and I was referencing uh a Goya painting. Um it's the 3rd of May. I can't remember the whole name of the painting, but it's a very famous Goya painting. Um depicting uh a civil war in Spain, I believe. Um, and it's sort of a pose that a lot of artists have appropriate over time, like Manet has, uh the Chinese contemporary artist Mu Min Jun has, uh Ducasso has. So it's um yeah, very sort of strong art historical reference to show, you know, I wanted to show people killing our own people, um, and including sort of depiction of police uniforms as well. In the third panel, I've um I painted him with his wife. Uh and on the top right, I've listed all of the different missions that they were forced to move around to after he was an officer. It was a sort of form of punishment to move you around from mission to mission. And for my research, I found that they were quite um, Alberta and Jack were quite uh they would speak out about conditions at these missions, and so as punishment they'd get moved around. They were never, they weren't allowed to go back to Gari. Um yeah, it's a very common but tragic story of just this um control control after they've you know made him do unspeakable things at the same time. So it's a form of loop. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, not being able to get connection to a community or um to people. Where is the work now? Um it's it's it's a public collection. I don't think so. I'm actually not too sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

It's a it's my highly potent, of course, work. I mean, and I I really feel with these works, you're you absolutely nailed sort of the ability to rediscover and record indigenous histories that have been otherwise denied, occluded, or as you just somehow pacified in popular Australian narratives. And looking at your next body of work, which is Angels in Paradise, the Manu Jun 9 panel work you created for the very prestigious Melbourne Now exhibition at the NGV, I feel that by now, which is literally only 2023, on after my very old 2020 paintings, I feel now that you really understand what you're doing, um, and you understand it as you a kind of your process, and I feel that you've really pushed it here in these nine words, all of which are overlaid on a warm mural. Um, I understand that you were responding primarily to the liner cuts of um the Australian social realists, uh Noel Coonaghan and um Russell Drysdale. But I can think we can see here a a Coonaghan liner cut of Albert Namanjira crucified. As a memorial to his unjust treatment by the government and authorities of the day, which ultimately led to his death. And I think it's man feeding his dogs by DrySdale. And that's talk us through your relationship with these artists and works, and uh as it plays out in this major exhibition, which really wasn't Tour de Force, I saw it at the time.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

So I actually think um the DrySdale work that was there was um called Station Blacks, which is a similar landscape, but it was of a family of Aboriginal people. I I equally love this work, but yeah, that was the work I had referenced um in the exhibition. So the these were two artists I'd learnt about in at university. I did a big um research project on Albert Namajira and comparing him with uh Russell Drysdale as you know, they're working at the exact same time. Um, but the trajectory of their career and how their art was taken was completely different. And um I was talking about their politics as artists and how Drysdale is this sort of social realist as well, and uh trying to depict a landscape and people in an exaggerated way, um, for a place that you know he had grown up on in and lived but wasn't indigenous to. Whereas I took Albert Namajira as this artist that was depicting his land, his people's land, as he saw it, as he remembered it, um, not trying to romanticize it. But then also there was moments when he would paint landscapes where he would have he would leave out sort of markers of pollinisation. Like there's I can't remember the exact paintings or locations, but there were ones where, you know, during the times when he was painting it, there were train stations put up in these landscapes that he just omitted from his paintings. So I was yeah, quite obsessed with both those paintings while at university, and they've both definitely influenced me as like how I think and how I want to storytell. And as you can see with my previous work, I was looking at historical events and historical policing and stories of colonization. And then for this show, I was given this really great big room at the NGV, and I wanted to talk about sort of the politics of today. And my dad is a criminal barrister and has worked on a couple of death and custody cases representing the indigenous families. And I had just come back from watching the um watching part of the inquest into the death and custody, death and custody of Kumanjaya Walker, who um a case my dad's been working on for the past four or so years. And yeah, I I just wanted to take those um I don't, I guess, political and philosophical intentions that Namajira and Koonaghan was doing, but do it from my perspective, from my lived experience of watching the news or my family or community. Um and to yeah, just that.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

So let's focus on one of them. For example, we've we've got uh a painting here, it's one of the nine, and we can see a highly stylized shirtless black figure handcuffed by a police officer in blue uniform. And I mean it's a stark example of how you're able to combine uniquely what you've just described, and what I would describe is is a fairly traditional portraiture and tableau, but you're able to leverage your historical tracking to sort of open up, as you said, present-day perspectives. I mean, and can we look at this picture here? Hands are so significant in your work or become so significant. And here's a classic example of hands.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

Um Yeah, I can talk about this work a bit. So I think this one's called Rumpus Room, and uh Rumpus Room was a bar that closed down, I think, two years ago in Brisbane and West End, where I grew up. And um, there's another painting I've done also called Rumpus Room, that's just a friend owns that's uh referencing the same story. So it was West End is a interesting suburb. The the main street in West End is called Boundary Street, which is the old boundary for curfew for Aboriginal people, um, when it was a more segregated place. And a lot of um there's like a park near near the main street, Musgrove Park, that um there's a lot of tent embassies there and protests there, and a strong Aboriginal community around West End. So when I was 18, I would go to this bar called Rumpus Room, and it was outdoor seating, and just next to the bar on this sculpture of this lizard, there was seating, and a lot of Aboriginal people would sit there drinking their takeaway grog uh because the bar alcohol is too expensive. The police would often harass them for drinking in public, and it was just such a confronting image because we're sitting right next to them drinking just as much alcohol, and they're right next to us, but they're getting harassed by the police simply because of the situation.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Um, so it seems like you had such a busy year last year because I I definitely saw your work, as I said, in a number of Melbourne institutional shows, including um From the Other Side at ACA, which was a nice dedicated to exploring, albeit through a feminist prism, how horror can cut across and even unseat certain forms of power and oppression. And you exhibited two digitally manipulated light boxes, a desolate, primitive place and I suspect, where you worked specifically and I think strategically with an acute form of well, um bald-faced horror through what I suppose we now call out as cultural othering, all set amidst the indomitable Australian landscape as captured in two seminal 1971 films, Australian movies, Wake in Friday and Walkabout. And if anyone hasn't seen these ever or lately, I'd highly recommend doing so. So I'll just get you to take us through your thinking here, but first we have a give you a bit of a rest. We've got a small video, I think you made at the time.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

My name is Mia Bo. I'm an artist based in Melbourne. In my work, I often interrogate histories of Australia that are forgotten or ignored. The light boxes are made from images from two Australian thriller horror films, one of them being Walk About, and the other film's called Wake in Fright. I chose these two films because it's quite interesting how they portray the settlers' discomfort with the outback. The silhouettes that I've put in these light boxes sit between a self-portrait and a presence or a spirit in the images.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

They're pretty dist it was a pretty disturbing exhibition and they're pretty disturbing films. It was your first experimentation with digital works, light boxes here, not films. And I now know that you've already created a storyboard. So have you got plans to continue with this meeting?

SPEAKER_01 29:36

I love light boxes, yes. And I uh photography is something I've always been very interested in uh trying. Um, but I just haven't had, I guess, the time to really explore it. But um sorry. I wonder why. Yeah, I know. I've got a bit of break next year. This is that's one that's my plan to experiment um next year. But yeah, these are just two films I watched in my early 20s that I love and I think they're so beautiful, like just the quality of the film and the how the the landscape is portrayed, but they're extremely disturbing films. Um and they're not as and of course that the portrayal of Aboriginal people is very dated and othering and um disturbing. In Wait and Fright, there's barely any sort of uh reference to Aboriginal people. I think there's one scene where you see it's just a cross scene of the camera where you see some Aboriginal people sitting outside a courthouse. That's the only sort of reference to Aboriginal people in it. Um and in Walkabout, the David Gulpell character, you know, is seen as a sort of almost scary, haunting character, and his end the the ending of his character is really not taken as anything serious, so it's just sort of this mystical being in a way. So yeah, I was excited to sort of bring these films into my practice. I would love to work more, yeah, definitely with digital.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

I've watched them on the again on the weekend. I'm also growing up watching them, but I mean breathtaking on numbers in in a number of ways.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

And shocking um in a number of ways as well. Well, uh so we're still on last year, um, because you were also included in the epic show curated by monuments Jennifer Higgy called Thin Skin at Mooma, where your work uh Wongorai Marat Marat, which is Dingo Spirit, was uh exhibited. And we'll come back to that later. But I mean, if I remember it was click it correctly, it was shown alongside that and Russell Drysdale and maybe Sidney Nolan. Sidney Nolan, yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

I didn't know if Russell Drysdale was in it, but um Gordon Bennett was in the show. I think there was about yeah, 30 just Louise Bourgeois was in the show. Yes, yep. Um uh I think oh god, the names now. It's too many. But it was an amazing show, and Jennifer was amazing. Um I know her.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

We and we met briefly, you and I met briefly down at the you were giving your workshop to high school students based on the notion of painting your dreams. Now, we've got another quick snippet, just I think a minute and a half from a video you made about that exhibition.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

When viewers look at my work, I want them to be interested in the narratives that I'm trying to tell, even if it's as simple as I'm wanting to depict figures and art typically depicted in art history. I want people to be curious and different types of storytelling and also different types of experiences. My name is Mia Bo. I am a descendant of the Bachelor people from Gari, which used to be called Fraser Island, and I grew up in Brisbane, also known as Mia Engin. I didn't grow up going to my sort of homelands. I have been to Gari once, and that's mainly because I didn't have a lot of family that lived around that area. It's quite hard to travel back to Gari if you don't have accommodation there. Place has played a big part of my work. A lot of my works don't have specific locations or landscapes, they're sort of taken from real places, but a lot of my landscapes come from my imagination. And I think that comes from not feeling super connected to one place. Often when I depict Gari and my artworks, they're not specific places, images of the place that I've seen online or in photos or from family, non-specific, almost dreamlike landscapes.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

It's just good to um have a look at that. We could to see how just how big that exhibition was and how important. Um, I mean, it was incredible to be in amidst those international and Australian artists. But listen, we'll come back to dreams and their spaces specifically, obviously, because I'm sitting in one. But you also speak um in that, when you're speaking about that uh exhibition, about an aspect of dreaming as being thin, as referring to thin spaces where the distance between the spiritual and the earthly realm diminishes or disappears. And I thought if we looked at the work um Mongari Marat Marat, maybe you would speak to that.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Yeah, it's actually, yeah. So um the uh the grief that I sort of mentioned in that painting from 2021 was grief of my brother, um, who died very sort of suddenly about six years ago now. And before he what after he sorry, just before he was he died, he was meant to move to Gari to be um a ranger on the island. So uh often when I'm depicting these sort of spirits um in relation to Gari, I'm referencing him. And uh I when he first passed away, we were all dreaming a lot about him. Um, and I think it's it's kind of more occasional now, but every few months I'll have this a dream about my brother. And weirdly enough, last night I woke up from a dream in the middle of the night about him. And it was really sort of horror fantasy dream that he was there, and it was really, I woke up quite like they're always really intense when I and then I woke up and I can't get back to sleep for a long time. And um, and so that gets sort of coincidental that talking about this today, and I had this dream last night. So, yeah, so that's it's sort of a self-portrait um, this painting. And uh when I'd first spoken to Jennifer about the exhibition, I wanted to mention these stories and grief as sort of this main emotion and this connection to him through dreams and um yeah, so that's this work. It's quite a personal and emotional work, um uh, but sort of yeah, it was sort of the perfect exhibition to make it for, I think.

SPEAKER_00 36:40

Do you ever um when you wake up, you have these intense dreams and you wake wake up after them in the middle of the night? Do you ever make notes or take a sketch or or do you wait till they and see how they resonate the next morning?

SPEAKER_01 36:52

No, whenever I have dreams about my brother, I I write them down and I write down the uh yeah, the date and the dream just to see what sort of stories are going on in my brain. Um but last night was like the wildest. There was like crocodiles and like it was just and one of those dreams that are all over the place, but you remember very certain aspects and the feelings and them and people. So um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Well, get back to you're certainly coming to your wild breeze in a few, but specific dreaming. Um, because while what I previously referred to as your lexicon of characters is still apparent here in these in the the larger Mummit space, many I know it's a now transforming and shape-shifting. I mean, for instance, what was a crack in the ground becomes a figure which becomes a star, or then a tree upon which hangs another star, or is it a jumping figure? And we're introduced to a magical modality of dreams and dreaming. Is this what you call the liminal zone, which is that space between abstraction and figuration, which you sort of say comprises its own logic? And if so, I wondered, is this logic free free, freeing for you, or is it constraining for you, this liminal zone?

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Oh interesting question. Um yeah, I would probably say it's a liminal zone, but it it's only sort of images and thinking that I can access while I'm asleep. I like I think there's this my brain is I'm such a logical person that it's hard for me to have these sort of imagined spaces in a way. Um and that figure that you're showing there, um, that's like a star man with a head, I've done a I've done a couple behind you in the installation. They are I've sort of been painting them for a couple of years now, and they're referencing this um sort of character in Burmese folklore called the lepia, and it's this idea that when you're dreaming or if you died, your spirit sort of morphs into a butterfly floating above your body. And um, I've actually got a couple of tattoos of this on my body. Tattoo yesterday, yes. And my d my dad got one as well on the same spot on his wrist. So um, yeah, it's sort of this. I think like the death of my brother like has impacted my art practice a lot more than I've probably sort of shared publicly. And it's always this idea of this spirit sort of just around, ever-present, um, sort of a like a sort of um representation of grief as well.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

So um so you as you explain the video and and you you you indicated that the dreamscapes and landscapes that you're making don't exist for you in particular in reality because of your disconnect to country having grown up in Brisbane, not Gary. Um I uh look looking at that thought, are they absolutely irredeemable now to you? Or do you believe that these, let's call them say similar crums that you create ultimately sustain you as well as informing perhaps changing other music in them? But would you think they would become enough for you as if they were?

SPEAKER_01 40:18

A sort of connection in a way? Yes. I think yeah, to an extent. Like I feel extremely um like a lay. Something pardon, sorry, like an artificial kidney or something, you know. Yeah. I think definitely there's been uh even if I didn't expect this, but this healing of like finding just like purpose really in my art of like this desire to feel connected to something and I'm able to sort of make these connections myself, um, which is very freeing. And I just it's just opened so many sort of um things for me. Like I'm doing an exhibition at the end of the year at the Harvey Bay Regional Gallery, which is on Butchelor Country, and I'm doing I was invited to do a residency in a couple of weeks um in Harby Bay and Ongari, and I'm gonna meet with lots of local people, like my family that I've never met, an extended family. So yeah, it's um it's giving me licensed to like sort of dedicate my days to learning more about uh myself and a purpose and history that has affects me and my family and really all of us.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

Oh I think I look forward to seeing I look forward to seeing that because I mean talking about the person I and while I think your work often feels very personal, um, especially when you're talking about your family and using your own domestic imagery, I feel two other things. I feel there's a huge political imperative lurking there, as well as an abiding sense of poetry um in your work. And some of it's written and some of it's conveyed. And I think you combine the two very interestingly in a more recent work you made for Brisbane's IMA earlier this year. Um, I think it was in a show for emerging Brisbane artists called Platform, where you made um a major six-panel installation, and the point of departure was a poem called Connoisseur by the well-known Uganda activist Uncle Lionel Fogerty. So what was your trajectory there?

SPEAKER_01 42:30

Yeah, so I've been reading Lionel's poetry for the last probably five years. Um, and his poetry is like, yeah, my favorite. It's some of it's quite hard to understand. He also didn't have any formal training at all. Um, and his poetry comes from his experience and his activism and um his passions. And earlier, just before this exhibition, so I think was it the start of this year? I forgot time. We saw mushed into one. But I had an exhibition with um my gallery in Melbourne, Sutton Gallery, also looking at different poems of Lionel Fogadys. Um, and then this was sort of an extension of that. And connoisseur is this poem that I've read over and over again for the last four years, and it's about the and Lionel references this a lot in his poems, this idea of the professor or the connoisseur, of people extracting from indigenous culture and indigenous tragedy to sort of form the basis of their sort of academic careers. And I not that I yeah, so that this sort of works. I'm referencing that. And I, in my installation, I draw this the horizon line that goes around the whole room to sort of uh extend the narrative past these boxed in canvases. And I've used a grid here that I've referenced at a Um a few paintings in the past to I'm sort of referencing the sort of the Renaissance idea of mapping out a landscape to give perspective. And uh Gordon Bennett used to do a lot of um grids in his work, and it's um an art historical sort of image that has been used a lot. And so this work was quite poetic and personal, and when I try to explain it, I'm like, I am kind of trying to explain the poem, which is already quite hard to understand understand, but means so much to me. So it is this sort of in-between of very personal, poetic, but then these very political stories at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yeah. And it seems since um Melbourne Now and Mumit to be enjoying very much the mural side of your work by expanding each painting well beyond its frame onto the very walls and shelves, which in turn prevails the viewer into that, I presume it's that liminal zone you're referring to in the Mummer exhibition. What prompts this line literally running off the page?

SPEAKER_01 45:04

I think I think it's um actually a symptom of my desire to uh not just rely on paintings and trying to sort of find ways of storytelling without just the constraints of a canvas. There was a painting I did um last year for Sutton Gallery, uh, and it's of a Burmese man in his home. It's talking about the sort of the surveillance of Burma by the dictatorship at the moment. And I on that painting I stitched onto it an actual Burmese lungeie, which is like a Burmese sarand. And I like objects that are both sort of and artworks that are both have paintings and that sort of artist touch, but also um sculptures as well. I like the combination of the two.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

It's uh and it is it also a celebrity or it defines institutionalism, uh sort of going beyond the boundaries.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

So I I kind of see them as like a um theatre set drop to all the paintings to have be like the characters of it. Um and it's quite fun uh being able to just paint on these big white walls and these exhibition spaces.

SPEAKER_00 46:23

So getting so we can which Riggs is two dreams, um which in their many guises and nuanced meanings, which we can discuss later, but specifically as you described them, um a spiritual world you can go to while you're asleep is in the middle form. And you've created Russ Dream Room, and I have to say it's just so many questions about so many things, but first, what made you want to revisit this subject? Um, which can mean so much more than just a sleep experience for this space?

SPEAKER_01 46:58

I think I liked how the uh idea of installing in the bathroom and it's this because guest bathroom. Well, because typically you walk into a gallery space that's big and you're walking around and you can look into other things, whereas it kind of felt like you're walking into like uh I wanted to make it feel like you're walking into my head in a way, this enclosed prison.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

We're gonna go, we're gonna go there right now, actually. So I um oh sorry, you go. Well, I was gonna say hold that thought because let's say you had the concept and you created three small paintings beforehand, before you got here. You know, you selected the base colour and then you slept on it. So we'll look at the three small works first, so we can and I think we get you to take us through how things develop. Because to me, these small works, um, the watching dream, the waiting dream, and the teeth contain the main, I'm not sure really what you call them, protagonists, motifs, if you prefer, or the bones of many of your scenarios, for instance. It's in the watching dream, the stretched, you've I heard you you said lanky, stick-like figure is slums white, three-legged stool, observing or confronting or conversing with a native doll. It's again uh an archetypal, colour-saturated landscape, desert landscape with a high distinctive horizon line. To me, I bet I feel this was the first, was this the first image you made?

SPEAKER_01 48:32

Yeah, so that that's actually a painting I made a couple of months ago when I was just trying to paint more dreams. And it was I was just trying to just like um describe the feelings of some of the dreams I have. And uh like since I was a kid, I'd had these dreams where I was being chased. And these are very common dreams, of course, like this idea of being chased um and followed and watched and not able to get out of someone's sort of control. And so that was this one. I wanted it to be a bit more playful and bizarre. So this is yeah, my idea of that.

SPEAKER_00 49:08

Um that in this idea the next one to my mind, and it's to my left, I don't think you can see it here, but you can probably see it in the screen. Um, is the waiting room, which is a night sky filled with I call them figure mimicking stars, but you described what they are. Walking, and then there's walking green ghosts floating on crack ground, which cracks could also be more ghosts or the shadows of ghosts, or people coming up from the ground and a metal mattressless bed. And then to my right, which you can't see on here, but you can see on screen, the most fabulously bizarre of all, which is a cabinet of teeth called teeth dreams, which I feel was made last almost if, and I sort of just imagine that almost if I'm waking up and realizing this is a the dream logic, this could be the dream logic answer to the question, or it could have been there all along as the stored memory chip of all the dreams. I don't know if I'm going here, help me out, me.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

Well, with this one, I it's actually yeah, it's a very common recurring gene. And I've had them quite a lot where it feels like yeah, well for me, it feels like my teeth are grinding down and falling out of my mouth no matter what I do to try and stop it. And like there's all these, you know, ideas of what those dreams mean for people. But I think it's for me when I'm in times of stress and anxiety and you're running your teeth, maybe in real life, and it feels so visceral when you wake up and you're like, I remember my last time I had it, I just like held my mouth, and I was like, no, it's it's like that moment of it's just a dream. Like it's it's almost movie-like the waking up because it feels so visceral. So I like this idea of this dream world of where do the teeth that fall out of your mouth go. Um, and it happened as cabinet of teeth.

SPEAKER_00 51:00

Yes. So then you came here on Wednesday, installed the paintings and painted on the walls directly. And you added a moon, some of the star people, a hand around the light switch and some eyes, and what I like to call, or I thought of as the time as the sly, double-edged but seemingly positive exhortation, keep on dreaming, escape reality. You left um saying, Oh, it's very spare in there, but you wanted to sleep on it and come back the next day. So I wondered as you left here, having done the first iteration of the room, what were you feeling and when you were making this part of the work and when you left thinking, what were you thinking about before you slept on it?

SPEAKER_01 51:49

I think um, I think I didn't know because I I mean I've just moved to house, had these ex two exhibitions, all these things. And I've been my sleeping has been sort of very affected by busy brain, stress brain. And I was just, I think I was hesitant. I was like, how how much of that do I want to put on the wall or do I want it to be more aesthetically bare? And I was just sort of working that out as I was going. And then I was talking to my sister about it, you know, the night between painting sessions, and she was like, just make it crazy. That's what you're trying to show. And so I was like, okay. So came back and added figures and more of a landscape and to really sort of touch our others.

SPEAKER_00 52:29

I mean, because when I came down the next day, it was just as you'd finished, I remember it, and I was dying to have a look. And you then you said, Oh, look, it's it's quite busy in there now. And it was very evident that you'd been dreaming. It was so funny because I remember we had the conversation that I'd been dreaming the night before, and so had Laura, and we were all nervous about various things about what we were having to do that day, and you had your we had the Zoom, you had your show. Anyway, but as it's your show here, we'll get you to take us through the dreaming that you had. So we'll start first with the the additions, and I I call it your alter ego, but maybe it was your sister who now wants no mistaking the sarcasm and the exasperation that fill that is filling the rally to keep on dreaming and uh escape reality.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

Yeah, so I I so when I came to do the first day of painting, I had a very brief idea of how it was gonna look. And then I a lot of it I was just like working it out in the space as I was doing it. And then I looked at the photos I'd taken on the night in between. I was like, that is such a laying same. Why did I write that? And go over my head, and I was like, you're such a lame bitch. And then I was like, this is like me, this is me talking to myself. Like that's I think that's what anxious brains do. You just like assess of yourself and go over it and critique yourself more than anyone else would. Um, so that was yeah, being into myself.

SPEAKER_00 53:56

Yeah, it's it's obvious, it's so it's so it reminds me of um um a thing my daughter had to do in kindergarten when she had to write a million times, I must not shout at Miss whatever her name was, and roaring like that. And anyway, the situation. You win over the room, there's a hope. There's there's one in the form of dream robots Aboriginal intelligence, because we know that your show is called Ros at Rosins is called Dream Robot. And so we you have our own dream robot here is resting just above the toilet, obviously before just popping down to Rosend's tonight. Oh, yeah. Umneak preview there for you. Um, but and then here the bed has a mattress and the star and people are hanging on trees while what I call the cabinet of teeth. Um, underneath the cabinet of teeth on the other room is a a breasted, I don't know, teeth collecting creek fans, the weight or the weight of the teeth, or are they weightless in a basket? Is it walking or sawing television? Let me take it from here.

SPEAKER_01 55:08

Well, it's actually quite now looking at it, you know, with reflection. Like I feel like that's how I was threatening in my body yesterday. Like really, I felt very like bloated and uncomfortable and just like I think I just, you know, be not being at home and being in a hotel and just sort of moving around a lot. Yes. And um, or paint fumes, no. Uh and I just, yeah, I just I think that's how I was feeling yesterday, and just like that sort of, you know, collecting of information. And it's I I mean it's called like the I don't know, I could call it like the teeth collector sort of cleans up after your dreams for you, or makes space in your brain.

SPEAKER_00 55:54

Well Mia, I'm I think you should have a lot of space in your brain now. And thank you so much for taking part in our Love for Art project and for taking the time to do this interview. It's been such a plebisc for working and speaking with you. And huge congratulations and good luck for tonight. And we'll put this interview on our website. And huge thanks also to Alura Chivastra for producing this project and Monek Spruell for research. So we'll see you tonight, Mia. Thank you so much. See you tonight.