I don't think 'Dark Heart' has to be malevolent. It conveys a sense of depth. There is a sense of questioning turmoil.
Skywhale is ambiguous. I think she is beautiful, but a lot of people think she is grotesque. You are drawn in and repelled at the same time, and it has to have that dynamic. My work has a certain element of abject mutation, uncertainty and darkness. Even she is dark - I mean she has ten breasts.
I use whatever media I think will best express my ideas and therefore I don't have a lot invested in the idea of photography specifically. I am more interested in Art.
Quality and longevity are the primary criteria, along with repairability and ease of production.
I don't connect accessibility with lowest common denominator.
I finished VCA at the height of the last big recession in the early 90s, and seeing that I was not going to be able to join one of the dwindling number of commercial galleries, I started an ARI called the Basement Project which ran for three years. Things came a little at a time and all of a sudden it's 20 years later and I'm still making art, which is really all I ever wanted to do.
If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that's a real success for me.
I have been interested in visual arts since high school and, after realising that I had absolutely no interest in the economics degree I had undertaken at ANU, I started a BFA in Sydney which I completed at VCA in Melbourne.
It's much easier to do something that's seen as being serious because people accept it right away, they don't question what you do, they just accept, because they think you must be right.
We tend to be talking to fabricators in the film and special effects or automotive customisation worlds. That having been said, I'm sure as more and more artists come to use these sorts of media, the expertise amongst conservators is going to keep pace with that.
The way we look at nineteenth-century English social realism and appreciate the working classes of the emerging industrial revolution.
I put a lot of time and thought into my work, which I see as a sort of respect for both the work and the audience, and I have always been very concerned that the materiality of the work reflects that.
The studio does a lot of testing before we settle on a system. Unfortunately, this means that price tends to come pretty far down the list.
The studio keeps notes on the details of editions and production processes and the like.
Of course, all my work is photographed and I also take quite a lot of photographs of work in production.
Obviously, I don't make an entire edition all at once, so the studio often goes back to produce editions, but that's a bit different. I guess I'm always thinking about the next work.
I tend to work towards specific exhibitions, so there will often be a big push towards the end when we're finishing off a bunch of stuff.
We did have one work where it looked like the fibreglass was discolouring, but it turned out it was reacting to the foam it was packed against in storage. We repaired it and sent it back with better packing.
I have a database of all my works that I maintain to keep track of works and editions.
In the studio we spend a lot of time working our what materials will work best and also last. We do tests and come back to them years later to see how they are still performing, and this leads our decisions.
A child came up to me and asked 'am I dreaming?' I had a similar experience coming to the Art Gallery of South Australia when I was a child. My mum had done a workshop here and it stayed with me. It's an important formative time.
My Father is a photographer, so it was always around. I was trained in painting, so I learnt a lot of skills about composition, light, colour, the formal attributes of images.
Now that other people have my works, it's really important to me that what they have has longevity.
We always use plywood rather than MDF for structural stuff for the same reasons [stability].
Melbourne is a fantastic place to work, but it's not the centre of the world.
