Archive

For a long time I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up. I can't remember the exact ages that this was something I wanted to do, but I feel it was like ages 9-12 or 10-13 or something like that.

Looking back, that's sort of an odd job for a young person to latch onto. After all, most professional scientists spend a lot of time in labs doing work with data, and that was certainly not something that appealed to me then (and even less so now). But I'd had a few experiences that made me quite excited by ocean life and those really shaped what I was attracted to.

When I lived with my parents, we would go to the same beach town, and for many years rent the same beach house, for a few weeks every summer. I have so many fond memories of these times and, as someone who has not always been very happy, especially as a child, I think these were some of my happier times. I really love swimming, I really enjoy the weird weightless feeling and how every sense shifts in the water - hearing, smell, taste, touch, sight are all SO different. I love waves, a good sized wave to body surf, that's what I like. I like the freedom and the anonymity.

One year, my Mum booked us in for a rockpool ramble, or at least I think that's what it was called. The local eco-tourism business took people out when the tide was low at evening and we would pour over the rock platforms looking for what sea life was coming out to feed and move about. We would see a lot of crabs, a lot of anemones and, occasionally, an octopus. Writing it down now this seems like such a minor thing - a couple of crabs and one octopus, is that enough to really change a person? For me it definitely was.

I'm sorry it's been ages since I wrote one of these. A combination of travel and not having much to say sort of curtailed things a little.

I will say that I am looking forward to my own hot boy summer and will be writing these fairly regularly :)

My plan, this year, with Tall Poppy Press, was to publish four books spaced out over the year. One in February, one in June, one in September and the last in November.

However, for a few reasons that plan changed and two books are broadly being published at the same time. While initially I thought 'well this will likely be a bit easier, I can condense my work and marketing and all that into a shorter period' I actually found the process harder. Sometimes doubling the output triples the work.

The two books that are coming out - With and For and Ambient Pressure - have both largely been fun to work on but both hit big snags with printing. Ambient Pressure, a book we wanted done, printed and sitting at my house ready to launch hit a major problem when the printer we wanted to use just could not match the quality of printing necessary. We scrambled and luckily found a printer that could do what we wanted, but that change and subsequent quality control meant weeks of back and forths that were necessary, but did mean that the books only arrived yesterday.

There were stressful moments, for sure.

Over the last few months I've been feeling that I want to pursue some exhibitions again. For a few reasons, this year I was relatively quiet with exhibiting - only being involved in one group show and one solo show. These were fine opportunities and I have no regrets, however looking back on the last 18 months of exhibiting I feel a bit like I missed the opportunity to do more with how I exhibit.

What I mean by this is that my exhibitions were quite simple - in ways that I now feel a bit unsatisfied with. Each has been photo printed on paper pinned to a wall, sometimes with a few objects. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this, I find it a bit lacking a presentation for me. I really love exhibitions where images are displayed in a variety of ways - on the wall, maybe also a display table, perhaps an object as well. Photography, more than other mediums, is really malleable - there's the opportunity to do so much with it, just because with the same image you could project it, print it on paper, print on fabric, create a collage, cut it up, etc, etc, etc. To see (and love) so much of this variety, but not see it in my own work is a bit disappointing. Sometimes I wonder: Matt why didn't you take advantage of these opportunities better?

See - my impression within art is that it's hard to ask people to take a chance on you. If I, for example, want to exhibit in a really new way (say, build large easels and place work in the middle of the room) galleries or committees would look at my previous work and potentially wonder 'well Matt's asking to do something pretty different with us - can he pull it off?'. I think so - I really do - I feel deeply that I can make my art in new and exciting ways, but getting that yes can be a challenge.

I've been getting really inspired by installation and contemporary art, as it's SO different from how I work. I work by thinking about issues or topics I want to explore, and spending years taking photos and assembling a collection of images that speaks to a variety of history, contemporary problems, ecology, etc, etc. That's one way of making, and it's served me well. However, sometimes I observe contemporary artists who look at making with more play and spontaneity - often making things for particular galleries, rooms or residencies, seeing the opportunity to exhibit as the catalyst to create, rather than thinking about it all first. I like that spontaneity, I like that sense of exploration, I like the space of possibility - I'd like to draw on that more, rather than always being so serious.

I know I've been a little inconsistent here, I've been mega busy with my day job and am currently on a trip in Vietnam which meant I had to spend a bunch of time getting things ready before I left. But! As always I'm chipping away at things.

1. My personal art

I feel like I'm in a good and transformative spot at the moment. I know where I want to get to, and feel that I'm developing the skills to get closer to where I want to be. Broadly, I want to be making more installations and exhibitions that are more than just photos on paper on a wall. I've started learning some basic woodwork and have a whole lot of summer projects lined up.

I want to be able to make structures, plinths, objects, etc that bring the photos I've made to new light and make walking through an exhibition of mine more of an experience and a bit more immersive. 

Recently, I've been day dreaming about buying a retail shop and having a bookstore for Tall Poppy Press, a little studio and then a space for food/drink. Maybe a friend would join me in the endeavour, maybe a family member, maybe my girlfriend.

Like a lot of my daydreams, there's a lot of romance involved. I love the idea of small, easily understood, autonomous things. I don't want, say, a chain of bookstores, or the biggest publishing company, I want something that's big enough to be what I want, and just maintains at that level.

For some reason that sense of scale and ownership is very motivating to me. I find the concept of just knowing everything that's happening really humbling and calming. Why have a 100 seat restaurant when there could be a 10 seat? Why have a publishing company that publishes 50,000 books a year when I could do 5000?

The obvious answer is that with scale comes larger profits, which I think is true when things go well, but the flip side is that there's more risk. There are, for example, employees that need to be paid -even if it's a slow day, week or month. There are, for examples, schedules, leave, suppliers, etc.

When I work a book fair, I'm working retail.

At a book fair, I have a table, I set up and display the books and posters, etc I have for sale and then as people come in I talk with them, show them what we have and hopefully sell some books.

In most ways this isn't complex, it certainly doesn't sound demanding and yet when the day is over I am usually just totally spent. Saturday, for example, I worked 10am-7pm at a book fair (which was a blast, thank you anyone who came down), but by 8.30pm I was totally and completely done. Off to sleep.

I find that work that sounds hard often isn't, and work that sounds simple is often hard. How tough would, for example, removing grass all day be? Just cutting and flipping sod. Not complex - it's a repeated action - but I'd be absolutely exhausted and probably hurting. Whereas my day job sounds complex, but really it's all fairly approachable and I rarely end a day just wiped.

I don't mean what does the word mean, I mean what ACTIONS and LIVES are sustainable.

In my day job, I run a program for University students about sustainability. Each year I recruit 25-30 students and teach them about leadership, action and community, then give them a small grant to go out into the big wide world and make it more sustainable. For me - sustainability is maybe the most important thing and, as we see crazier weather and are barrelling towards a 3+ degree warming by 2100, the status quo just isn't good enough.

With this in mind, it's pretty obvious to anyone that we, collectively, have to change, and it's pretty obvious to anyone that a person like me - well off in a globally rich country - are the people that will need to change a lot. While I want companies and the richest to change the most, it would be a bit naive to assume that I can live my life unchanged, unfazed and unchallenged and see the world continue as a safe and stable place to live.

I find it frustrating when I talk to some of my friends, who are more business or profit inclined, that they seem to be obsessed with the reasons change is hard and the status quo is good. Of course there are lots of great things about the way we, especially in Australia, can live, and yet it's also beyond crystal clear: we need less C02 in the atmosphere. Until that number starts and continues to drop we're doing the wrong thing. How we get there may be complex, nuanced, hard and we certainly don't have a clear path forward but, at the end of the day, we change or we cook ourselves.

While, in general, I roll my eyes when someone talks about the pandemic, I wanted to start this email with the qualifier that the change I'm writing about today was really brought on by say it with me the pandemic. More or less, these days, I just don't want to go overseas anymore.

For years, much of my twenties, I had a lot of great overseas adventures. Whether it was making new friends in Malaysia, having a great formative trip with my girlfriend in Italy or friend-hopping around the USA so much of what made the texture of my life was the two or so trips I'd take each year.

When I lived in the UK travel was then, too, a large part of the experience. Visiting Iceland, for example, was one of those perfect things that I will always feel grateful for.

But, these last few years I've found myself completely ambivalent about the prospect of international travel. It's odd, as this year I have three international trips: Singapore (done), Vietnam/Laos (soon) and London/Paris (November) - so there's a lot of travel for someone who is claiming to be over it. If I really was sick of it, would I do it so much? And I guess the answer to that is 'hmm, maybe?'.

Hello everyone,

It's going to be a hectic few months for me so I wanted to give a bit of a studio update a cheeky apology for likely being a bit absent over the next 3-4 months.

So - what's going on?

Over the last five years I've spent a lot of time at wildlife sanctuaries of various descriptions, often visiting expressly to photograph an animal I don't have the ability to get close to in the wild.

This was a big departure for me. As a kid (and adult) I've certainly been to many zoos (good and bad) and enjoyed lots of time with my family seeing animals in captivity and in the wild. Some of my most formative memories involve seeing sea life in rockpools, spotting koalas in the trees and visiting various zoos around the place.

I had a turning point in 2015. My brother and I were in Berlin and the zoo there, for some reason, was something we'd heard about - perhaps famous or well known for some reason. As we walked through we got to the big cats and a leopard tirelessly pacing its enclosure. This tiny space - maybe as large as my kitchen - was a concrete cube with some risers and some taped on foilage. Seeing that, I don't know, it broke my heart. This animal should have acres to roam, here it had centimeters.

But, as an artist I've wanted to get closer to animals in ways that are impossible in the wild. For The Killing Sink, it was a bit of a revelation that, instead of trying to get close to a bird 50-1000m in the sky, I could visit a wildlife keeper and get within 2 meters. A lot of my work is about collapsing distance and finding a scale that feels very intimate, almost claustrophobic. I want the texture of the feathers to be almost physical in the photograph, the heft and imposition of a real animal to feel visceral. That's just not something I was getting when I photographed the birds in the wild, simply because they were far away and didn't want much to do with me.

Apologies up front - this is a rambly one and sort of covers a lot of ground without doing very much.

As an artist, if you want to make a living, you can work a day job, work in the arts (say as a gallery staffer or curator), work as a practitioner (a photographer taking photos of a wedding for $) or try to sell your work.

If we focus on that last one, I think it's an interesting thing, as a lot of emphasis can be put on selling. Classically, artists hate it and, generally, it's not something that sustains many people financially.

If a print of my work sells for, I don't know, $1000 that's a big chunk of money but (and here's the but) - how many might I sell in a year? It's a big pay day once or twice a year and, when it gets down to it, not really much over a 12 month period. But if I sold something for $100 - maybe I could sell 10? In my experience that's also very optimistic. Not that many people actually want THAT many prints. How much wall space do you really have? But even if I sold 10 and made $1000 it's still not much money, over a 12 month period. Still, I'd prefer the 10 at $100 because I prefer accessibility over exclusivity. I like Keith Harring who wanted everyone to see what he did, I like that. I think it's good. More, a larger audience, a bigger pie, a more generous spirit.

Before we dive into art and money #2, I wanted to share three points of context:

1. When I started this newsletter, there was a pervasive sense that Instagram was going to kill photography on the platform and that constant tweaks to the algorithm were making it difficult for businesses to share their products with users. As a person who runs a business, to some extent, through instagram, it was a bit of a turning point for me: I needed to own more of the channels I used or I'd be forced to continue playing an unseen game.

2. There's often a slightly nihilistic idea that artists aren't ever going to earn a living wage, artists will always be broke. And while there's some truth to that (it isn't simple or straightforward for people to earn a living from art) I sort of think that's a stupid thing to believe. I'd like to, at some point, earn a living from creative things - that's one of my long term aims. Hoping for it overnight is naive, but not working it out is defeatist.

3. As an artist it is essential to have multiple income streams. But today's newsletter will focus specifically on selling objects (prints, books, posters, etc).

of the financial year here in Australia, which is a time a lot of people dread, find boring or forget about, but I really like. It's an odd thing, I acknowledge, to enjoy tax time, but I think what I really love is the sense of wrapping something up. Being done with all the business of the last year or so.

I keep my own accounting and each year is a chance to refresh things and make that all a bit smoother and more helpful.

For example, one thing I've become quite interested in is 'how much money has tall poppy made?', it's a question that, due to how I have been accounting, is impossible for me to answer. My accounting wraps all my different art expenses into one bucket - so if I buy a new camera, pay for this newsletter or pay for printing of a tall poppy book they all go in the same big bucket. Similarly, the money I've made from art - publishing, teaching, selling, speaking - ends up in one bucket, which makes it hard to then pull apart without lots of manual work which I don't want to do.

Now that's all legal and above board - but what it does do is make it tricky for me to go 'well for the $xxx I spent on Tall Poppy I made $xxx'.

This is the second email I'm sending about what I'm working on. I don't know if this is interesting - though a few folks did get back to me after the first one and say that they found it somewhat engaging. Thanks for that feedback.

My art practice

I'm working on this project called Corner Country. It's a good at the Dingo Proof Fence as a place where great ecological damage has happened and has subsequently been upheld. It's not just that people did the wrong thing 100 years ago, but that many continue to want to make things worse.

Everything has its season is something I say a lot, to me it means acknowledging that there's a time for effort, a time for rest, a time for beginnings and a time to let things end.

Often this newsletter is a place for me to push back against things I see in my day-to-day life. In a lot of ways, the sort of slightly contrarian, whimsical and ineffable ideas that take a home here aren't things I can really discuss so easily with people around me. I don't always feel like arguing and I can't really prove my ideas. So I just let it slide.

But something I do believe is that there is no one way of doing things. There's a see-saw between busy-ness and quiet, between an empty day and a full one - instead of an endlessly repeating routine, mostly a good life is one that encompasses a wide array of experiences and enjoys them, rather than selects only for certain things. I wouldn't always want to be busy, I wouldn't always want to be free. I want both.

A few months ago I had 4 weeks off from work and spent that time making new art and doing publishing things.

Since that time something I've been wondering is 'when can I go shoot again?'. Having traveled 2 days to where I was making art work, and having to travel 2 days to then get home again, it's not exactly a location I can pop to for a long weekend. For a while I figured I'd just wait until next year to keep working on this project. I will have a break over summer, but the desert in summer is not where I want to be, with many places I was visiting easily hitting 40-45 degrees regularly there's just no point trying to make that work.

But I felt like I had good momentum - I don't want to wait another 12+ months to keep working on things. So in the last week or so I've really started delving into what else I can do and where else I can visit.

The project is looking at the Dingo Proof Fence and how a history of land clearing, agricultural mismanagement and native animal extermination has rendered a biodiversity hotspot in the desert quite barren. Now that most of those farms have failed and few people live in this area, it seems that we really should be thinking how we can tear down the fence and start giving areas of this land back. For context, the area of land that was destroyed and doesn't support many people or farming is about the size of my entire home state, Victoria. Or about the same size as the entire United Kingdom.

There's a gallery I visit once a month or so near where I live and work. I like the guys that run it and like their shows and sense of play with the work that they show and curate. When I walk in and have a chat they ask me 'working on anything?' and the answer is usually pretty bad.

I do work on things but my process is slow and enthusiastic. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and getting excited, but not as much time photographing or printing or exhibiting. Publishing is a bit tricky to share with this audience as they know me as an artist first, friend second and publisher third.

Instead I spend time working on publishing, selling and book making. To some extent these are the larger pieces of my craft: things I work at day in and day out and, I think, I'm getting a lot better at. When I edit people's work to make books right now I feel confident that my decisions are good, or at least make sense, and my design notions are, similarly, getting better. If you think of craft as something one is continually honing I'd say that this is the best example of that for me.

But recently I've started to hone the way that I exhibit. See I really like exhibitions - I think installations and exhibitions can be really exciting, immersive and complex. I love exhibitions that feel like I'm entering someone's world - that block out the rest of the world and suck me in. I want an experience, something where the whole thing makes me go 'woah', rather than just the painting or the sculpture or whatever.

I don't quite know if everyone is like me in this way, so apologies if it's a little weird. Something that I find very motivating and de-stressing is knowing I'm moving in the right direction, that what I'm doing, seeing or achieving is, more or less, what I'm aiming to do. I can get a little bit too excited and hopeful and if this happens I can also get really sad when those too-high expectations aren't met.

So I find having some form of baseline or more grounded expectation really helpful.

I remember when I was maybe 10 I really wanted a watch, my friend at the time had found a cool one for like $14 at a random shop. I begged Mum for it and she said no and it really upset me. I sat in the car outside of our home that day angry and sad, and eventually Mum came out and explained she'd bought me a watch for my birthday which was around the corner.

I think she then said something like 'you get so fixated on what you want and then it doesn't happen and you get upset'. It was a good lesson and I think I've largely been able to roll with the punches a lot more (thank god) and mitigate my internal compass a bit better.

At some point while I was in University I decided that I wanted to get into growing food. I really cannot remember exactly why, but I think I was reading a lot about reliance and resilience and one easy way people often recommend developing those qualities is to try and grow something.

My Mum, a prolific gardener, had a side plot that wasn’t being used and graciously donated the space to me. I was living at home at the time and could spend a lot of time gardening. I remember planting lettuces, silverbeet, celery, tomatoes and even some heirloom seeds. I can’t remember it all but it was a bounty. My last summer before I moved out the tomatoes grew 2m tall and I missed a lot of them as I was studying :(

As the garden grew, I started reading more and watching more TV about food growing and planting. It was the peak of the food movement, a micro-moment where a few commentators were advocating moving away from industrial agriculture to more localised systems of food production. And while ultimately that movement failed, it was a really interesting moment to be spending more time in the garden, eating food I grew and participating in the community. I think that movement is over-rated and under-appreciated. More localised systems of produce would be a lot better for people in lots of ways, but are unlikely to solve large scale problems (but that’s not the only metric of success).

I really was drawn to permaculture as a process. Permaculture is one of those obnoxious things that has a lot of great ideas wrapped up in a slightly annoying fan base. Permies, as they’re known, are the sort of people believe conversation is the same as action, communal approaches to everything will bear out and have a deliberately husky and soft voice. Not evil people but sometimes I just want to putter about the tomatoes without the communal living gurus spruiking shit my way.

I wanted to make these a monthly thing as I hope updating people about what I'm working on is interesting. I always find the behind the scenes look at other artists/professionals really engaging. Something about seeing what they are trying to do and what that looks like day-to-day just makes me very curious.

1. My art practice

Last month I was able to make some big headway with my own art practice. I went to Sturt National Park for 10 days and took a LOT of photographs. I was looking at the Dingo Proof Fence the land 'inside' the fence that's 'protected' is essentially cleared, desiccated and home to abundant feral species (and little native species). I'm really interested in sharing with people through this work WHAT we protect and WHY that's a problem.

Failed geoengineering continually propped up by vain hopes for control.

I've become pretty interested in posters recently. I think I'm drawn to the way they are both very creative and very commercial.

The more I do things as a publisher the more I'm motivated to find ways to make the business I run feel interesting, creative, exciting, visual and cool.

For me, a good poster provides another form of raw material. Maybe I could print it and stick it under my car windshield wiper? Maybe I could print it and hold it up and take a photo and that's the promotion? Maybe I could photograph it displayed on my screen? Maybe I could print 10 and arrange them in some weird collage?

I find myself really buoyed up by ways where even marketing can become this fascinating form of creativity and play. My friend Morganna recently said 'maybe you're more interested in design than art', or something to that effect. And she certainly is right: often what interests me is when art work is used more as a material than an end in of itself.

So I don't really drink caffeine.

Not out of any particular health ideals, but just because most things with caffeine in them are bitter (coffee, tea) or just mega gross (those energy drinks are awful).

While I'm often sleepy, especially in the afternoon I haven't had any real issues with feeling awake or alert, so I've content just not having any coffee.

However, over the last year I've had a few brushes with caffeine that have made me reconsider whether I'm in the right.

Two experiences recently sort of expanded my mind a little in regards to how I think about what my influences are in terms of art making.

The first was when I was attending the Singapore Art Book Fair last week. This was my first time representing Tall Poppy Press at an international event and, as such, there was a lot to think about and learn.

One thing I observed was that book makers and publishers in Asia care a lot less about the construction of a book than those in Europe or the USA. In the Western countries I'm more familiar with, construction signals quality, in that more expensive options for book binding and printing are largely considered appropriate and serious, while cheaper options are seen as not quite good enough.

Something I often think about when I'm out making art is what on earth some random hiker or traveller would make of what I'm doing.

This picture is from a recent trip to Sturt National Park where I experimented a lot with using backdrop paper (the long white paper I'm holding) to isolate and frame elements of fencing, plants and other things.

Each day, I would drive out to segments of the park, hang up paper and take photos. The desert is windy, so I needed all the clamps on my shirt to hold the paper to the fence, and I needed my flyscreen hat to keep the 100s of flies off me. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I was often covered in flies - my hands, my shirt, my back, everywhere. Only the net stopped them pushing into my eyes, earns, nose and mouth. My girlfriend has discovered a dead fly or two in our car and, frankly, I'm amazed there's one that few.

Anyway - art is sort of insane. As an artist you engage in these very bizarre actions that don't make much sense, with the hope that the product of that process will be interesting, amazing, fascinating, worthwhile. But the process itself is difficult to explain. Sometimes people, say my Dad, will ask 'what do you do when your out making art?' and it's like such a good question that's really hard to answer.

Hello everyone,

I've been wanting to try a studio update once a month for a while now, but I kept forgetting. For a while I thought it'd be fun to do it as a video, but I really don't have the time to get that done. Or, if I'm being more honest with myself, I don't have the inclination - editing video, oof.

Before we get a bit stuck in, I had this awkward moment last weekend where I had to describe what I do. I was teaching a workshop on photobook making and one of the participants asked me 'so where do you fit?' - I was like, a bit hard pressed to answer. I make books, I'm also a publisher (these are different), I design books (but I'm not a designer), I write (though people don't often need that) and I also do a lot of exhibiting and teaching. To me all these things are just expressions of the same drive to create and participate, but when I stack them up together it can be a challenge to find how to explain it all.

I once heard someone say 'labels are like funerals', by which they meant that a label is for other people to understand you, not for you to understand yourself. I like that.

When I was in school I was really into music. Mainly listening though I went through times where I played a lot too.

When I first started playing guitar I must have been 10 and it was just so much fun, practicing and learning and getting better. Then there was the doldrums from age 12 to 15 where, really, I didn't improve or learn much. I would go to lessons and muck around, but I'd barely practice at all at home.

Sometime around 16 I started getting a lot more serious again. I was playing bass pretty consistently, and had found a teacher that really worked with me and how I approach learning. I practiced a lot.

But the thing about practice is that it's sort of a messy, vague umbrella term. What do you do when you practice?

I think that we, generally, know a lot more than we realise. Often little nuggets of wisdom are buried deep, things we know but aren't conscious of.

One example of this in my life comes from teaching. When I taught High School, one of my favourite subjects to teach was Economics to 12-14 year olds because essentially they have absorbed all this understanding of pricing, markets and economics from living in a capitalist society and suddenly I was giving them this key to articulate what and how was going on.

Kids, for example, knew what supply and demand was, and how they worked, just not exactly what those words were, which meant the class functioned sort of like dredging up something ingrained but not spoken.

There's a bit of a philosophical question here: if you can't express something do you really know it? I'd say 'yes', but I'm not going to die on that hill. I, at least, often think about what art I'm making in my head as a pastiche, a slideshow made up of all these things in progress, made or imagined. I know it, but I can't articulate it, yet.

As I was walking to the supermarket yesterday I started wondering to myself 'Matt, why do you enjoy things that are slightly inconvenient?'.

The supermarket I was walking to is not the closest to me, it's not the second or third closest, it's fourth. Yet, despite the extra distance I often walk the 25 minutes there and 25 minutes back quite happily. For a long time I've known that I deliberately embrace some inconveniences and make them a part of my life. If I go to my work's office (a rare occasion these days), I walk instead of ride my bike. If I miss a turnoff while driving I don't mind that it's added 10 minutes to my drive. I use a bundle of hacked together processes for my website, social media and even this newsletter.

While everything works, it's not very direct or very clean. While this would drive most people up the wall, I sort of love how much friction there is. It's the right type of busy.

I find the effort that takes more time keeps me energised, while the thinking that shaves time off and makes things faster is really boring. A few weeks ago someone asked my opinion about the length of a kitchen cabinet door as they were trying to optimise the distance between their toaster and coffee maker. It was beyond me to care, though over their life it's likely this will save more time.

I think I've previously written that one of my less well known time sinks is playing video games. A lot of people at age 33 have grown out of video games and sort of eschew them all together.

More somber people than I, it seems many of my peers have to engage in more structured, productive or measured ways to spend free time, being nearly upset to 'waste' time playing a game. It seems to me, these friends and colleagues only narrowly see productive activity as a justifiable use of their time.

So I have a confession to make: I often enjoy some business-adjacent self-help-light content. There's a ton of crap in this area, but there's also some very small nuggets of wisdom. As someone almost habitually interested in reflection and introspection, the way some of these writers blur psychology, anthropology, life advice and career writing can sometimes (sometimes) really light me up.

When I was finishing University, way back in 2010/2011 I stumbled across something called "Early Retirement Extreme". It was a forum, and a book, all about anti-consumerism and DIY ethos so that people could decouple from a day job and live a more self-reliant and free life. While it may sound a bit trite, I really loved the humanistic contrarianism of it all: don't keep up with the Joneses, live for something more interesting. For most people in that community, more interesting meant like growing potatoes, busking, making art, reading a lot or learning to build things.

Since then I've shifted away from most of that thinking - the discipline and commitment needed just aren't things I really have - but I still enjoy reading the occasional book or article (or podcast) about the intersection of aspiration, career and reality. Life is a compromise, isn't it? None of us get everything we want - so how we make and live with those compromises, and what compromises we make become really fascinating to me.

A concept I've found useful is one of 'little bets'. Now I have to admit I've not actually read the book where this concept comes from, but the idea is that instead of making 'all or nothing' plays it's much more effective to have a couple of little bets. Instead of quitting it's perhaps more effective to drop a day of work. Instead of placing all your money on one thing, it can be more effective to spread it out. Instead of trying to become a stadium-gig-rock-star a better starting place might be an open mic, then a bar gig, then an opener, etc.

Recently, I spent two weeks in hospital. It was not planned or expected at all. One day I developed a screaming headache that wouldn't go away, no drugs or rest would change it. I could barely open my eyes.

When I got to hospital I quickly became something of a mystery. The doctors tested me for about a hundred things but nothing came back positive and while my pain receded, I had a persistent fever and some nasty stuff in my blood.

Finally, after two weeks while I didn't have a diagnosis the doctors deemed me well enough to go home. Today I have my - hopefully - final test.

But after so much time in the hospital I began sort of collating some thoughts about the whole thing. I want to share some here.

When I made my second zine I included a little bit of text. The zine was a collection of photographs from Kosciusko National Park, a place I really enjoyed exploring while I lived in Canberra. This relatively small part of Australia has some of our most mountainous terrain and snow and because of this felt both really unique and very adventurous.

In the text I wrote about how walking and hiking are activities that you can't hack or shortcut. There's only one thing to do: put one foot in front of the other. In that repetition and simplicity, free of efficiencies, measurements and evaluation, creativity and the mind completely open up.

I find, still, walking around brings for me so many ideas, so much life and a ton of appreciation. Recently I've had to be re-assessing a lot of my habits and I was recently asked 'do you notice things visually that others may miss?'. While it's a tough question to ask, I think the answer is 'yes, but maybe just because I'm often out walking around looking and being delighted'. I like to know the trees, the good places to see sunset, the spiders' webs, where the bats are, the most interesting flowers, the weirdest houses, the constructions that are being undertaken, the quiet parts of the river, the desire paths that lead somewhere special.

Walking, exploring, finding things that are really wonderful is a really pure expression of what I think life is really about: to be open to letting life unfold in unexpected ways.

Something I've come to accept over the last 3-4 years is that summer is, for me, a time of rest.

Previously, summer was about adventure. For most of my adult life I would go traveling or on some sort of adventure each summer. One year I went to Japan, another I drove my Mum's old station wagon around the surf coast, running into different friends and reading a lot, another year I went to Taiwan.

The last big summer adventure was a three week trip to the USA followed by a long road trip through New South Wales. This was 2019 and I'd left a job with no concrete next step. I was planning on going back to University (which didn't happen), and had a bunch of time off. I was burned out and the two adventures really gave me a sense of freedom and excitement I'd been lacking.

It's worth mentioning that, being in Australia, summer is now. The end of one calendar year and the start of another. So often I'd be finishing a year and finishing a contract - when I was a teacher for a few years I would work one year at one school, finish up, then get a new job at another school. So summer was sort of this breathing room between ending and starting.

During COVID I learned how much of my life is motivated by what's 3-6 months ahead of me. Melbourne's long lockdowns (one of the world's longest at 277 days) made clear to me that what often gives me a bit of pep, or a bit of a buzz, is what I've got coming up. Whether it's a holiday, a photo shoot, visiting a part of the bush, a weekend away with friends, whatever, those things are often what occupies my mind and gives me that light at the end of the tunnel. Moving to a 'take it day by day' approach was possible, if only because everyone I knew (more or less) was going through the same thing, otherwise I'm not sure how I would have done.

So, with that being said, I thought it might be a good time to share a bit about what's coming up for me an how it all fits together in this very unique art career I'm building.

For those who are new here, I'm hoping to eventually be a full time artist and leave my salaried job. But a lot of people don't have a good image of what a full time artist, in my case, is. Currently, I do the following things:

a. I run Tall Poppy Press, which is a publishing company that makes and sells photobooks of Australian artists. Through this I sell books and, soon, other products. I also get the joy of working with a lot of artists and market places.

Currently it seems many places are having some extreme weather. Actually, something my girlfriend mentioned earlier this year as that Australia appears to be in a perma-crisis. Shuffling from bushfires to covid to flooding to (now) heatwave, we're just continually pummeled by bad weather and bad news.

The last few days have been HOT here, with yesterday topping out at close to 40 degrees which, for someone who lives in a bit of a heat island, definitely is unpleasant (I'm typing this in a room on the third floor that gets morning light and lots of it, so I'm usually roasting).

On the flip side, the USA is in some intense blizzard/snow/chill, and a week or two ago the UK got blanketed in snow (though I don't think this was too bad). I keep reading about countries working through a heatless winter due to Putin's war, and how some of the conditions are unseasonably bad. It seems a lot of places are going through some extremes.

For most of my life I've thought I was a cold weather person. Summer was (and still is) my least favourite season here in Melbourne. With it's stinking hot days, fierce oven-like winds, sunburn, sweat and long, sleepless nights, I just always feel like I'm done with summer more quickly than other seasons.

One of the things I tried in 2022 was to start an art project about the Ocean.

The Ocean is a really fascinating thing. In a lot of ways, water defines Earth as a planet and our ability to exist at all. Arguably, the sun and the presence of water are what makes Earth, well, Earth. 70% of the planet is the Ocean and it's so large that it's difficult to fit it in one's head.

The Ocean is a place of leisure, a superhighway for commerce, a military hot spot, a site of climate change, the location of some of the most successful conservation (whales), a sensory other world (dive underwater and all your senses shift) and, for me, a scary place.

For many years, probably since I was 10 or 12, the Ocean actually frightens me a bit. For some of you who know me that's probably a bit surprising as I love swimming and will take almost any excuse for a dip in summer. But when the water would get a bit deeper than I am tall, I'd start to freak out and panic. It's like almost agoraphobic - there's so much just THERE beneath me, unfathomable depths, anything lurking, I'd just start to panic.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who, from time to time, finds themselves doing some life or values questionnaire. Sometimes these come mandated from my job (as a form of weird personality profiling I've yet to see lead to any use whatsoever), sometimes through reading a book and sometimes just as part of my own introspection.

One of the activities these things ask of us is to try and work out what's most important. Is it ambition? Is it relationships? Is it kindness? There are lots of positive values in the world, and the hardest thing is trying not to do it all (because we can't). When I engage in these activities, one of the values I often come back to 'freedom'.

I don't mean freedom in a libertarian or American way, where there's some social imperative to rant about personal rights or shoot someone or whatever else people do with that logic. I mean freedom in terms of a form of autonomy - to do what I want, when I want, how I want. Mostly, what I want is the ability to go for a walk without feeling like I should check in with work, or drive to see a superbloom because it's amazing, or visit a desert in flood, or lie in a hammock for half the day. No social imperatives here, just a unique way of spending time.

In some ways, how we live our life is the ultimately creative act. We get one shot (I think, at least) and no redos or backups. I'll never have another 13th of December, 2022 and isn't that a call to spend our time the way we want to? Really want to?

No one has ever accused me of being fashionable, for very good reason. I think my Mum and girlfriend have a secret chat where they share photos of me in shirts because it’s so rare. But, for a year or two, I really enjoyed learning and thinking a bit more about clothing. I was 22, had a new job and needed to stop looking like an overgrown teenager.

Fashion is a really bizarre world. In some ways it’s the most accessible and familiar form of art (along with ceramics and music), yet for all the familiarity, many of us look at the fashion world with just such confusion and suspicion.

Sometimes this is because the ethical concerns are very clear (fast fashion, slave labour, over consumption, body image issues), but more often I think it’s because some fashion is just so fucking weird. Like some atrociously skinny model walking down a runway in some gargantuan mistake of an outfit does, often, feel like a spectacle and a joke. And it's SO EXPENSIVE, it all seems a bit ridiculous sometimes, doesn’t it?

This is also true of the people in fashion. Like a lot of public facing artists, designers are often incredibly idiosyncratic, sometimes problematically so.

Milo is a type of chocolate powder that you can add to milk/water to make a hot chocolate. It’s malted and has a very particular flavour. It’s popular here in Australia, but also in parts of South-East Asia, particularly Indonesia and Malaysia, where it’s often mixed with sweetened condensed milk.

The thing with Milo is when you add it to a liquid it takes a while to meld together. Milo is a sort of a powder, but actually more like granules then something like sand. So when you mix it with a liquid you have to stir and stir and stir to get it to combine. Often you’re left with this floating layer of unabsorbed Milo powder on top of the drink. Worst case, you’re drinking plain milk with a cough-inducing layer of chocolate on top. Not great.

About ten years ago I worked out that if I left the drink for a few minutes, it becomes way better. A lot more of the flavour ends up in the liquid and you get something pretty rich and tasty. This is the 5 minute Milo, just give it a couple of minutes and it gets a LOT better (I also recommend soy milk and have a few other tricks up my sleeve). 

So, I was supposed to be sharing that I'd been out bush and made lots of photos and wow what a great time. But, due to the floods, I was unable to head out to the bush.

For those who aren't in Australia - the last, I don't know, two months it has been raining steadily. Many parts of the East of Australia (where I live and make art) are wet, wet, wet. Many parts have had bad flooding. Even places that haven't flooded have had to make changes due to the volume of water.

So, my plans were cancelled.

I had this plan, basically, to spend 10 days making photos. 10 days straight. Over time, I've become a feast or famine artist. I'm either making a LOT of photos with nothing else on, or the camera is gathering dust on the shelf.

Hello everyone, I'm in the bush this week and I hope I'm happily snapping photos while you read this.

If you're new here, welcome!

I've been prompted by a few people to write a little bit about photobooks and money. I want to preface this by saying that there's SO MUCH I could write about this topic, and I won't cover it all. In fact, a workshop I'm running focuses several hours on this topic, so it'd be impossible to condense that into a neat, easy email (only 2 spots left at time of writing ;) )

I've recently been asking a lot of people for their experience with publishing and money. For context, I've published a few books - from my own zines, to handmade books, to a huge run with The Killing Sink and, of course, I own and operate a publishing business - Tall Poppy Press. I'm about as in this world as you can get, and yet, it's tremendously opaque. Regularly, artists are asked to contribute money, but when, how much and for what is really tricky to nail down.

So - I did not get out to the bush the last week.

For those not in Australia, we've had record breaking rainfall and huge floods. While the area I was intending to visit isn't (and wasn't) flooded, the roads were wrecked. Specifically, I needed to drive my little car 80-90km down a dirt road which, after quite a lot of rain, was completely impassable.

That's ok - I'll be out there 12th-20th of November.

In the meantime I read a pretty interesting book Against the Anthropocene. This is a book all about the ways that human-led environmental destruction and resistance are represented visually. It's not usually the sort of thing I'd read but I'm glad I did.

Hello all,

I am in the middle of nowhere this week, documenting wildlife surveys in a big property. It is (I hope) fun and important work. It is (I hope) actually happening and the recent flooding we've had in Australia is (I hope) not so bad I can't drive my car to where I need to go. I hope to tell you about how this trip went next week.

Recently, I have had a lot of rejection. That is fine, it's normal. I'm not looking for pity, sympathy or 'poor me'. If you're an artist rejection is just part of it. You propose an exhibition, apply for a grant or submit to an award and, more often than not, you're getting told 'no'. Rejection stings less each year, but it still stings.

So I've started to wonder: how can I make rejection fun? I was inspired by 'un-Rising' which was a 1 night festival where everyone who had been rejected from a big arts festival could exhibit/perform or share in a car park for free. It was a great idea. It was particularly great because Rising didn't tell people that, actually, they were only going to exhibit 4 artists' work at the city wide festival. This is key because if you know they are choosing 4 for a whole city, you get a sense of the scale and impact they are looking for.

One of the really particular quirks of education in Australia is that, around the age of 14-16, a lot of schools assign their classes Of Mice and Men, the John Steinbeck novel.

I should be clear: I really like this novel and Steinbeck in general. He's the sort of artist I really admire: he uses all his skill and life experience to speak up for people excluded from his art form and, in his way, try and do justice. When he's not doing that he was a whimsical engagement with place, people and travel, a sort of really lovely difference between a thunderous 'truth to power' and a calm 'man trees/the ocean are pretty great'.

However, in a lot of ways, that Australian teens are assigned this book is an odd choice: a depression era story about someone with a disability essentially being bullied until his best friend mercy kills him is an unusual thing for modern day young Australians to be assigned. Sure, there's some genuine empathy building and some great charactertisation on Steinbeck's part but almost all books have some education pros so it gets to be a bit of a level playing field.

One of the hardest things about teaching this text is getting students to understand the vernacular. In fact many teachers, almost like clockwork, will start off, before the book's even open, introducing the idea of vernacular.

I love food and am having a quiet week. Food consistently makes me happy. I love cooking, preparing, shopping, eating, enjoying.

Here are a list of some perfect foods:

• Ice cream after a long swim in the cold ocean

• Peanut butter

• Slightly under-ripe mangoes (early in the season, just a touch of tang - amazing, early season calypsos go HARD)

• Big pot of pasta (my favourites are: sausage/brocolli, sunday gravy, lasagne, tomato pesto and fresh summer tomato)

• Apples (Jazz are the best, I think)

• Eggs with salsa

• Good milk chocolate

• Gozleme

• Cherries

• Cherry pie

• Apple pie - with a lot of apples and vanilla ice cream

• Tuna

• Fried rice

• Beef ho fun

• Char Kway Teow

• Miso soup

• Scallion pancakes

• Black forest ham

• Egg salad sandwich

• Chocolate Chip cookies- chewy, soft, large glass of cold milk please and thank you

• Apricots fresh off the tree, otherwise get the fuck out - this food has the largest drop in quality as it sits

• Dan dan noodles

• Butter chicken (I am accepting no feedback on this)

• Dill

• Bread

• Croissants (raisin, almond, plain - they are all 10/10)

• Satay - from a street cart, eaten on the street

• Sultana bran (I will accept no questions at this time)

• Pork rilette

There's a lot more, but these are all just perfect foods. They need nothing more and are just a marvel to enjoy.

Something I've written a bit about is here before is how my life is split between my day job in Education and my life as an artist. For many years, it's felt pretty easy to keep both going, pouring effort into each and generally there's been few conflicts or difficulties in rocking up for 9-5 then moonlighting as an artist/publisher/writer.

However, over the last year, as art has begun to bring in more money, I've found it increasingly hard to balance both. Largely because having a day job just eats up time in a huge way. I'll give you three quick examples of how this is becoming a bit trickier to manager.

a. Australian Geographic want me to write and photograph for an article about Wedge-Tailed Eagles. Great, I'd love to do that - it's exactly up my alley and the pay is great. To do the writing I have to interview several people at the Department of Environment, to take the photographs I need to go to Shepparton (2-2.5 hours away from where I live) twice, for two full days (more or less). So that's 2-3 days worth of work and somehow I need to convince my day job to give me the time off. Likely I'll just pretend to be sick or take a mental health day. It's dodgy but no one will notice.

b. Two galleries in Europe have expressed interest in working with me and doing exhibitions in 2023. To do these shows, I'd need to be in Europe for 4-6 weeks. This is potentially a really good opportunity to have some exhibitions, do some talks, meet some European artists, gallery owners, etc, and get more of my foot in the door there. However, 4 weeks it the maximum vacation time off. I could ask for extra time off, but my workplace would be well within its rights to say 'no, sorry, we need you to do your job'. I could also ask to do it from Europe but, again, my workplace is fairly able to say 'no, we need you in Australia, during regular hours thanks'. This is a potentially big opportunity for growth but it's directly in conflict with my job. I also need vacation time to travel to the bush and make art, and, you know, have vacations here and there too.

On the weekend just past, I went to a stable and visited some horses. A friend's sister has two horses and I wanted to photograph them because I'm trying to photograph feral species and horses are one of the more destructive feral species in Australia. But there was another reason to visit horses as well, as this person was showing me her horses she asked me if I ride horses 'well no' I said, 'actually horses intimidate me a bit'. I find that most large farm animals: cows, horses, pigs - I always worry they will like charge at me or get angry. It's a bit of a silly thought since they have been bred for millennia to be docile but still, I find them a bit scary!

There is something very different, I think, about seeing something from afar and being close. I've seen people ride, handle, lead and training horses, muster cows and be very comfortable and easy around all of these animals, but when I'm close to them, and their size and weight (and how little I really know about them) becomes more apparent, things just change. An animal that seems maybe small, or easily led, when I'm next to it suddenly seems a lot bigger, stronger and more complex.

Sometimes I wonder 'what is understanding?'. It's sort of a commonly used but somewhat nebulous idea. Is understanding a horse knowing that I can lead it and it will follow? Is understanding a horse being more comfortable that it is larger and stronger than me? Is understanding the feeling of comfort that comes after some exposure and learning? Is it the textbook, or the doing it all? For me, I don't think I understand things until I interact with them. For something like a horse, cow, goat, snake, spider or tree this means being close enough to actually look and appraise. For something like a car, I don't really know it until I drive it. For something like an exhibition, I don't really understand it until I make it.

In Education we don't really know what understanding is. Famously, Bloom's Taxonomy was a way to try and define different depths of knowledge or ability about a given topic. In this 'understanding' was the 2nd step (eg, 2nd least deep form of knowing), and is essentially someone's ability to explain things. But, I think I can explain something like ink (coloured liquid that marks a surface), but I don't really understand it - why is it the colour it is, why do some sink into the paper and others take ages to dry, how long will ink be shelf stable, is ink toxic?

Something a bit odd about me is that I don't really celebrate my birthday.

When I was 16 I woke up thinking 'this will be a great day, everyone's going to be so nice to me' and people weren't - my family were busy, my friends had things to do, people had lives and priorities and things on and I was really sad, I didn't have a special day, in fact I think it was super mundane, like just aggressively normal. A bit forlorn at the end of the day, I walked down to the park, sat on the swings and I sort of realised that expecting something so self indulgent made me miserable. It was bullshit to expect the world to revolve around me and, now, I don't celebrate my birthday.

It's always a bit bizarre, at work some busy body asks 'when's your birthday' and I have to explain 'I don't celebrate my birthday' and there's always this pregnant pause where this random person takes a second or two to think about what on earth that means. For me, birthdays are quite awkward. I sit on my butt while people sing to me - hate it. I have to pretend to be happy that my work colleagues got me some over-priced junk that I don't want and gets thrown out? Who benefits from this? I'm really quite happy just plodding along having a pretty unimaginative day, maybe I'll get myself a milkshake but that's about all I want.

I see that some other folks have these big social media outpourings of love when it's their birthday and it seems a bit much. I guess I'm just a pretty content guy, I'm happy going for an extra long lunch break on the sly instead of having fireworks and trumpets blaring.

I'm obsessed with fencing and fences right now. I think that they are the most mundane expressions of a sense of inclusion, exclusion and control that most of us see daily.

From temporary fencing around a construction site, to a white picket fence around a family home, from walled military installations, to rambling barbed wire fences - Australia is just a cacophony of borders, designations, dominance and 'fuck off we're full' - a fence is control epitomised. The panopticon might have been Foucault's favourite metaphor, but I think the fence is more present. I wonder what architects think of fences - I wonder if, somewhere, there's even a textbook about the theory of fencing, the history of fences, the whole world of what a fence pretends to do (make life easy) and what is really does (carve up the land). If it exists, it'd probably be pretty dense and dull, unnecessarily so, I think.

More than what you might find in suburbs and construction sites, Australia is a country of fences and for fences. In fact, the longest fences in the world are in Australia and were built as a way to control the native animals in order to enable better farming for European settlers. The longest is the Dingo proof fence, stretching 5,614km (or more than three times the length of Germany, 2/3rds the length of the US/Canada border). The fence is so long it is longer than Australia is wide. At our widest point, we are 4000km from East to West, yet this sprawling, winding, constantly maintained and cared for fence is just massive. If you laid it end to end, it would be longer than China is. Insane.

The purpose of this fence is to keep dingoes moving from the wilder and less settled regions of Australia's interior into from the more arable sheep grazing districts in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. It's an absurd project, spanning an unfathomable length (still, to this day) in order to exert an incredibly powerful measure of geoengineering on the land. It is clear, always, that in Australia agriculture comes first - that was true when we were settled, and it remains true to this day. The bizarre value system that says we should completely slice our country in half so fewer sheep die is uncanny to me: it's familiar (I grew up knowing about it) but I cannot empathise.