Archive

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.

When I was a teacher, there was a segment of my colleagues who would often lament that working with teenagers made them feel old. Responding to the warp speed trend changes that only teenagers care about and keep up with, a segment of my peers would remark 'oh I don't know what lit means, I'm so old'. I never really knew how to respond, I'd often think - well, of course you're older than teenagers, you already knew that. But also I'd think 'why do you want to keep up with kids? It's exhausting and not really very rewarding'.

I'm lucky because I've found getting older much easier. In fact it seems most years are a bit kinder than previous ones. Of course there are ups and downs, hard things as well, but in general I feel much more content at 33 than I did at 23. In a lot of ways I was quite bad at being young. I didn't enjoy primary school much and high school was quite boring until I was 15 or 16 or so and matured a bit more. I don't drink alcohol (never have) and have no interest in drugs. I'm completely happy sitting quietly on the grass or meandering around in my car taking pictures of trees. It was a bit tricky when I was in Uni, I didn't really want to go to the pub, the bar or the club - I was much happier going to friends' houses or getting lunch. Now that I'm a bit older, it feels like my friends have caught up to what I like and it's great.

There's a nervousness and egotistical anxiety that I observe with people vainly chasing youth, self-conscious and embarrassed about their age. But aging is natural, it's what you've been doing since the second you became alive. You can't fight it, it will win. No one lives forever, no one looks young forever, no one acts young forever. And more than that, there's something so grim and pointless in observing people who try. I think we've all seen or met someone who just doesn't accept that they are 10 years older than they are acting, and it's a bit lame. I think we've all met someone with tattoo'd eyebrows, an obvious combover, or too much botox and just thought 'ah, let it go, give in - life's about more than this'. Maybe that's cruel of me to say, but still, you ARE old and we can tell, who's the performance serving?

I think that being accepting and graceful is very under-rated. Sometimes it feels like even in Australia we live in a place influenced by Hollywood and its capricious and predatory hunger for youth and beauty. It's unhealthy and ultimately futile. I wonder, those who do worry about aging a lot, do they like that about themselves? Is that how they want to experience the world?

During COVID I got really into Saturday Night Live. I don't know why, it's not always funny, but there was something about watching compilations of sketches I really enjoyed. As a creature of the internet, the sketch format lends itself so well to in jokes, repeatability and memes, it just sucked me in.

There's a great Adam Sandler skit where he's playing a travel agent where the joke is all about how 'the same sad you where you are will still be sad in Italy'. It's a great joke - if you're sad where you are, and you get on a plane to Italy, the same sad you where you are will just be in Italy. Wherever we go, we're still us.

The last few weeks, I went on my first overseas holiday since COVID went down. I flew to Hawaii for a friends' wedding and stayed there for a bit over ten days and even before I returned home, people were texting and messaging me 'how was it? what was it like?' which are questions that I always have a hard time answering.

I wasn't sad, but some days I was tired, or sick of the sun. So someone would ask 'how is it?' and I'd think 'well its hot, I'm sweaty and honestly I'm a bit sick of it today'. But that has nothing to do with Hawaii and everything to do with me. I find it funny, of course people aren't going to be super precise with their questions, but no one asks 'are you enjoying yourself?' or 'are you having fun?'.

I'm off to Sydney tomorrow and Hawaii the day after. It's my first non-art-making holiday (and first international trip) since early 2019. For 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 so far, apart from weekends away, any time I've had a break from work I've been going somewhere specific to make photos, conduct research or whatever else is needed to get things done.

I had a taste of what Hawaii will be like over the weekend. I was in Queensland being a supportive boyfriend as my girlfriend's company had an annual retreat to a resort on the Sunshine Coast. Up until this point in my life I would have found the idea of lazing around warm weather in a resort almost offensively unpleasant but, after a few years of not much travel, man it was great to plonk by the pool, or the beach, soak up some warmth and read my book. I napped a lot, ate a bit and generally took things pretty slow.

Hawaii I expect will be a bit more active, but not much. I really feel like I could spend just a week ambling around swimming, lying down and looking at the sunset. Throw in some mangoes, maybe a smoothie or two, some fresh fish - that's just about perfect for my current mood.

It's nice tracking how we change sometimes. When I was younger I was never a super speedy one-day-per-city traveler, but certainly I wanted to be somewhere less removed from the world than a resort, hotel or tourist beach. In general that's still my preference but, actually, this time, I sort of completely don't care: I'm just looking forward to being relaxed and wearing shorts.

One of the things I want to do is show The Killing Sink in places that aren't Australia. To me, this seems like it would be a big step up and allow me to share things that are important to me with people who perhaps have never, and might not ever, think about life over here.

What makes this uniquely challenging is how ignorant and distant I am. If I think about Australia, I have a decent reference point for galleries, festivals, events, opportunities. I can probably ask a friend to introduce me to someone who knows someone, etc, etc, it's not that hard to get around any more. Doesn't guarantee any 'yeses' or anything like that, but at least it feels a bit more productive than it has in the past. I think the LinkedIn crowd call this networking, but really that doesn't quite capture what local knowledge means, to me at least in art that is.

Anyway, the past month or so I've been exploring can I exhibit this work overseas, how would I do that and would it actually be worth it? I've talked to a dozen friends, a few professional peers and one or two gatekeepers.

Still, there are no clear answers to these questions and attempts to seek clarity are very, very messy, and quite upsetting, really.

One of the things I want to do is show The Killing Sink in places that aren't Australia. To me, this seems like it would be a big step up and allow me to share things that are important to me with people who perhaps have never, and might not ever, think about life over here.

What makes this uniquely challenging is how disconnected and distant I am. If I think about Australia, I have a decent reference point for galleries, festivals, events, opportunities. I can probably ask a friend to introduce me to someone who knows someone, etc, etc, it's not that hard to get around any more. Doesn't guarantee any 'yeses' or anything like that, but at least it feels a bit more productive than it has in the past. I think the LinkedIn crowd call this networking, but really that doesn't quite capture what local knowledge means, to me at least in art that is.

What I'm getting at is that if there's something I want to do here, at least I can think of a decent way to approach that aim.

Anyway, the past month or so I've been exploring a few questions:

I think the question that I ask myself in my art life is 'what's next?'. With art making, we often fixate on the wrong end point, and this can cause some consternation. Before this year, I would think a lot about how I am going to make work - what kinds of photos to make, what kinds of exhibitions or publications I want to put effort into. I think, without realising it, I was treating those objects as end points - but it's more realistic to treat them as mid-way points.

When you finish something, it's really just the start of something else. Finish the last page of your draft novel, well now there's editing, selling the book to a publisher, etc. Receive the book bound from the printer? Well now there's publicity, selling the novel (again), working on follow ups, getting it reviewed, etc, etc. Most of us might assume that the publisher drives a lot of that and, fair enough, if you're a big enough deal they probably do. But if you are just a standard writer, artist, creative - you are the one sending those emails, sorting it out. That was certainly something I hadn't thought much about until now.

So in a way, the end product is sort of a springboard for what ever ends up being next. Which is both exciting and exhausting.

If you're not someone with your own art career, I think music makes a really good metaphor for what things look like. No one's START is playing a stadium show, or composing the soundtrack for a Hollywood movie.

A friend asked me to write about why I don't like to use navigation apps in cars and I figured 'why not? it's a whimsical enough topic', so here we are.

After many frustrated years, my girlfriend bought one of those phone holders that sits at eye level and cradles your phone as you plug into Google Maps where you want to go. To most people's confusion, I almost never use it. I refuse to, often. In fact, I almost completely oppose using Maps at all. Something about the grating voice, the never-in-time instructions, the pointless 'don't exit' interruptions that wreck the flow of driving and the over-reliance on a machine I barely trust to tell me where to go just makes me angry. I'm not interested in optimisation, shaving 2 minutes from a trip by taking a stressful de-tour or being so disconnected from my surroundings that I can't get from A to B without a global positioning system. I think it's kind of childish not to know, say, how to drive to my parents' house, the rock climbing gym, my best friends' place or Mildura. I'm not that busy and life's too short to be stressed all the time.

For the worse, then, I am one of those people who you can occasionally hear pointlessly arguing with his phone. Truthfully, I fucking hate them and am continuous debate about whether it's time just to drown the fucking thing. I think a lot of people can relate to this, though I suspect my friend who asked me about this would be quizzical. Convenience isn't, for me, actually very convenient. The overly smooth, unnecessarily machined form of living something like a car guided tour represents just doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather just head out and do it solo, that feels easier and more enjoyable.

I like the Oliver Burkeman school of thought: the more you try to grasp time and eek out every time saving the more rushed and stressed you feel. You'll never have enough time and working hard to get more of it just slams that fact back into your had. On the other hand, time that feels really luxurious and long is almost completely divorced of effort. Lying my the creek listening to the water, riding a bike on a sunny day, cooking a really good meal - could be minutes or hours - it doesn't matter. So I like to resist things that purport convenience but add mania, tell me they'll make life easy, but rob me of engagement. Boredom often feels like the longest time and, far from an inconvenience, so much good shit has come out of being bored: good ideas, interesting hobbies, unusual forms of creativity. Some space in the day goes a long way, that's something I believe at least.

Hey - so I think this is my, like, 5th email that's been about starts and ends in some form. I didn't realise that I've been thinking about things in this way so much but here we are. I guess even I'm learning.

Here are some starts and ends.

1. I've started a new job. I've joined a University as a Student Success Coach. That means my job is to help students complete their studies in a good mood having learned plenty. It's a new role at the workplace and I've not really started yet (just induction). I'm glad to be out of Project Management and into something that's more people focused. Surprising everyone who knew me when I was 14, I've turned out to really enjoy working with people and helping them. Day one was Monday, so this is very fresh.

2. This means my period of holiday has ended. I managed to wrangle three weeks off between being a Project Manager and a Student Success Coach. It was great. I went bush, did some artist talks, absolutely SMASHED about 15 exhibition/festival/grant applications (let's hope one comes back positive) and pushed my publishing business' projects along. I also made a big collage and developed some new directions in my practice, that's sick. It was a waste of what a full time artist would be and it was great, but there are bills to pay.

3. The first financial year of treating art as a business has ended. My art brought in $25,458 over the year: sales, grants, artist fees and some commissions. My business expenses were $40,000 - which is quite high because I bought a fancy new camera, paid for a ton of printing (and books you pay for up front then they sell) and included in that is a bunch of car and home office expenses, so it's a bit misleading. The government is giving me back $5700 in tax, which is a nice donation - I'm treating it like a once-a-year artist grant. I can recommend that, if you're juggling a day job and multiple streams of income from another business an accountant really made things easier. First time I've used one!

4. The last book of 2022 that Tall Poppy Press is publishing is just about done. It's been a great project but the most circuitous one to make. Increasing costs, supply chain slow downs, scheduling complexities - you name it, we've been working through it. But the finished book should arrive this week or next and it's already a smash. So that project is coming to an end (sort of, still 2 launch events and selling it to go).

5. I've started making three new books with Tall Poppy Press for 2023. Each one is really different from the other and the business will have some really nice expansion in what it makes, shows and publishes, which feels great. The book I'm most able to share is a book that's an anthology of exhibitions/installations. It's a bit hard to describe but I think it'll be a complete smash hit. I'm enjoying emailing artists and asking 'hey, can I use your exhibition in my book?'. It's really nice to let people know their work means a lot.

6. I've ended some yo-yoing that was kicking my ass a few months ago. Like a lot of folks I've been guilty of pegging a lot of hopes on one specific thing, then it doesn't quite go to plan and I feel like shit. Earlier this year I was struggling immensely at work - I had a friendly but poor manager and was just feeling like a complete loser. I needed a job switch, but more than that I needed to work on bring a bit more accepting and go with the flow. It's a hard thing, sometimes, just to keep on trucking and not like, frantically apply for a zillion jobs or feel the only solution to discomfort is action. Ended is maybe a bit ambitious, but we're getting there.

I've been making new work recently and it's sort of being amazing and disappointing all at the same time.

The amazing part is being out, energised, engaging with people, feeling like what I'm making is purposeful, fun and interesting.

However, the disappointing part is looking at it and realising it's not good enough yet. In some ways this makes total sense: it's new, it's not finished, of course it's not good enough. But I've realised that there's something a bit more pernicious going on in my thinking and perhaps it's a good thing, but also perhaps it's making me feel worse than I should.

For a long time, perhaps even still, some of my favourite photography is editorial photography. For those who are not familiar, editorial is when a newspaper/magazine/website will pay a photographer to go shoot something for an article/feature/etc. The photographer has to produce something that looks fantastic, perfect even, in a short amount of time. So the people who work this way are just masters of the surface of the image. This stuff is highly perfect, tightly controlled and very specifically executed. In my head, especially when it comes to colour work, these types of photographs are really what I'm playing towards.

When I lived in Canberra a friend of mine from teaching said 'hey come rock climbing'. She is a really accomplished climber, as is her husband (Australia's foremost alpine rescue expert, former Churchill scholarship recipient) but at that time, after having two kids, it was a slow period for her. So she roped me in. Ever since I've been climbing most weeks. I'm not very good, though. I'm not into the culture too much, or the grinding, or trying to crack every problem. The people are friendly and I enjoy the exercise, but the whole scene gets a bit much.

Anyway, yesterday I was at a gym climbing and all I could think of was 'man I have been doing this for five years and I'm so bad at it'. Objectively, I am the lower-middle-class of climbers. I can do one level above where most beginners start and, on a good day, two levels above where most beginners start. Which, for five years of work, is pretty bad hey? It's almost remarkable how consistent my plateau is!

I find there's something kind of funny about this. In areas where you could see progress clearly, it's also a chance to reflect and think 'man I haven't progressed at all'. Yet, for me, I don't worry too much about it. At the end of the day I do the activity because I enjoy the feeling and I'm proud of myself for exercising. I'm not trying to be a great climber, just have something to do on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.

It seems to me, and this may just be me, that I have to put in quite deliberate effort to get better at something. Even if I'm doing it, regularly, I don't necessarily improve. I've climbed for, I don't know, something like 250 hours and yet I'm arguably not any better than I was after 25 hours. The extra practice is just, well, a flat line.

I wanted to share a bit about how being an artist is going financially but I’ve had a surprisingly busy week and just haven’t had the chance to crunch the numbers yet – sorry, might have to wait a few weeks!

Anyway…

Low and slow is one of my favourite ways to cook. I really, really get excited when a recipe includes things like ‘let it simmer for 3 hours’, ‘put in the oven for 5 hours’, ‘let it sit overnight’. I think I enjoy the combination of pre-planning and then completely hands off that this type of cooking needs.

The other good part of cooking like this is that people get really impressed with the results, which is great because it’s a very lovely effort:happiness ratio. I really enjoy cooking for people, and putting in an inordinate amount of thinking into it. It makes me feel really, really great when friends or family are visibly enjoying things I’ve made for them and there’s something very direct and rewarding about the experience of providing someone with sustenance.

One of my favourite things to say is 'there's a season to everything' and it strikes me that it's a slightly more poignant way of saying 'everything ends'.

Sometimes I feel like being really energetic and frenetic, other times I like to be slow and patient. Some years I'm active and exercise a lot, other years I tend to just walk around and enjoy that. I have a fairly generous sense of following my own nose and tend not to question why I do what I do or whether there should be something else I should be doing. Such a moralising word, should, not sure I'm a big fan (unless we're talking about ethics).

When I was a kid my Dad told me, with a bit of gentle scorn, I was a fad person, I just would pick up things, get obsessed, enjoy it then stop. It would never be something I got properly good at or stuck with. Seasonality Dad, look it up!

Anyway, I have a friend who just seems always wrapped up in trying to change himself. More time in the gym, more productive down time, better sleep, more learning, reading more, whatever - it just seems so joyless, exhausting and pointless. What, I sometimes wonder, is different in his life for all this effort? How many more books does he actually get through? How much more sleep does he really get? I really wonder: how much more strung out does he actually feel running himself ragged?

On Friday last week I went to my first live music concert in a long time. Not just because of COVID, but just in general I don’t go to much live music. Still, this was a special event for me – one of my favourite bands, Boris, was playing an album they released way back in 2002, well before I could have gone to seen them.

I had an absolute blast, but this was largely because there was so much nostalgia, identity and like life philosophy tied up in this band and music for me.

Boris is a doom/stoner art metal band from Japan that have been around since the early 90s. They are kind of impossible to pin down and seem to re-create themselves from scratch each time they release an album, which is about once every 18 months. Some albums sound like garage rock, others like j-pop, others just are drone music. Not every album is good and I don’t like them all. But when I first heard the band I felt so absolutely inspired and, to a large extent, still do that they’ve become a fixture in my life ever since 2006.

I used to listen to heavier albums and imagine myself on stage, the music was a form of daydreaming for me, they were life and soul. I’ve run to them, danced to them, played them in cars, brought myself up, had my breath taken away, made out to them and felt alive while they were playing. One thing that makes me sad sometimes is very few people I know actually listen to this type of music, or have ever really tried.

On Friday I had a big shipment arrive at my house, a pallet jack had to be used to get it from the truck to my front door. Shrouded in an obscene amount of plastic, a few dozen boxes contained 350 books that are the culmination of five years of work. Shakily I opened a box, took one out - it's so small, light - it's crazy, in a way, that such a long amount of time ends up distilled into something so specific and, in a way, condensed. I love the book, I really do. I'm immensely proud of myself, but it's incredible - over 1500 days end up being able to be refined into something really unique.

Five years ago, in 2017 I started thinking about Eagles. I saw someone else's photos and thought 'hmm I want to do that with Wedge-Tailed Eagles'. The first picture I ever took of an Eagle was during a spring drive home from a hike with my girlfriend, it was 2017 and I was captivated. She was irate, I was pulled over in the middle of a dirt road on a mountain, she was worried we'd be cleaned up. Always the worrier, that one.

In 2018, things changed. A big court case broke about people murdering eagles. Something inside me collapsed. I'm usually a really hopeful person and believe most people (99%) are just trying to live a decent life, but there was something so fundamentally upsetting and challenging about learning of these crimes. How could someone do that? How could they look themselves in the mirror, or go to sleep at night? Where's your heart, your head, your soul? From then to now I've been working to build the project that is now The Killing Sink.

Five years is a delicious round unit of time, but for someone like me (a spoon, not a fork) there's almost nothing I've done for five years. I've never had a job for five years, haven't lived in the same place for five years since I finished school, I think I have a pair of hiking pants that are five years old, I've been with my girlfriend for 7-8 years and I've been trying to make great art for 10 years now. I think those are like the only 5+ year milestones, which is amazing. I'm writing these figures because I'm sort of amazed I stuck with something for five years. It's such a long period of time for me, I'm so wildly unfocused and energetic I stop-and-start rather than see things through. But I saw this through.

Hello everyone. I know I'd said I'd be too busy to write a newsletter this week, but guess who has COVID? (symptoms are mild and I'm almost done isolating) So, I do have plenty of time.

Starting something new is a bit of a weird experience. Having finished, completely, the Killing Sink, I've had a few false starts on working on the next thing.

It's worth exploring how people work a little as a bit of background for why it's been a bit tricky for me to get started. Some folks just have a camera, take pictures of whatever and then eventually use their editing to build something cool. This would like an author going to the cafe, writing spontaneously everyday and gradually pulling different ideas and passages together. It's fun, to some extent, but you gotta do it everyday. For a few years I tried to do this and it didn't work for me, at all. So I'm much more of an ideas guy - I read, research, talk, work out what an interesting idea is then go and work out how that can be cool art. Or, if I was an author, I'd be spending that time thinking 'what kind of a story would be cool?' and plotting it out before writing it.

The problem with this is: you don't know how good and idea is till you get going. Lots of things sound great on paper but the execution isn't there, similarly, a simple and unimpressive idea on paper can be absolutely gorgeously made. For example, Jenny Holzer's idea, to reinterpret ancient wisdom into aggressively short sayings, sounds sort of bland. Yet the result is one of my favourite art pieces ever. I actually hand wrote a few of these and they sit above my PC at home. Simple idea, BRILLIANT execution.

Hi guys - I'm traveling for work, then on leave, then traveling for work again, so it'll be a while.

Have a great three weeks :)

On the weekend I went to the You Yangs with my parents to weed Koala habitat. We were looking for a plant called Bone Seed (what a great name!) that essentially koalas do not like. We're not sure why, but it seems to prevent them from moving between trees (for those playing at home koalas climb down one tree then wander to the next one).

While weeding I also learned that one of the larger issues facing koalas (whose numbers are falling precipitously) is that the strands of trees they have left are often isolated from creeks and rivers, and the koalas die of thirst, heat exhaustion and exposure. In warmer months, koalas move towards shady creeks and rivers, in colder months to more exposed trees. We've cleared trees near creeks and rivers, often for the purpose of farming, and the koalas have little left. In the You Yangs, koala populations have dropped 46% in the last 10 years.

Bone seed is a weird little plant and it's something I wouldn't have noticed before this event and now I can't stop seeing it. I think it's interesting that these little tweaks totally transform my world view. I remember, when I was like 14, my Mum took me to a weeding day where the group we worked with was trying to remove agapanthus from an area. An introduced species, agapanthus chokes many native species. Since that day I abhor agapanthus and if you have some planted you should bloody get rid of it! Now bone seed is a plant I'll see and probably just rip up. Willows too, something I used to love but now see as this monstrosity.

Of course it's a bit weird to imbue plants with human intention, but that helps me understand the processes that are going on.