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Interview – Goodie

Interview – Goodie

For many years, creatives from all across Australia have pulled up stumps, waved tearful goodbye to their home towns and headed south (or east) to seek their fortune amongst the streets and lanes of Melbourne. Since way back when, Australians with a creative bent have often looked towards the city as an artistic mecca, one to which they must make at least one pilgrimage to in their life.

For many, it’s just a holiday, but for others it’s the Big Move. Some make it, some fake it, some find other paths or settle down into mundanity, and some, after having tried all of the above move on to other adventures and pastures, but come they do.

So it was that in 2014, Goodie picked up her life and headed south, following in the footsteps of many other Canberrans seeking new trails of experience amongst Melbournes multifaceted art scene, bringing her an enigmatic style that has garnered her a whole bunch of fans.

Two years later, her works have spring up all over the city. With her surreal abstracted portraits splayed across often unnervingly strange positions amongst forgotten slivers of architecture, for all their oddity they never seem out of place in their surrounds. It sometimes feels as if their stylistic contortions are emanating out from with the very walls themselves, leading to tricks of the eye and “oh, hang on” moments as you pass by them – no fanciful optical illusion tricks required, just a simple embedding of presence maintained by a constant desire to explore.

Although relatively new to the streets of Melbourne, her work had definitely had an impact. Making her home at the reputable Juddy Roller, she’s dug in her heels and consistently turned out work that had increasingly bettered each piece before it.

Luckily for us, we had a chance to throw her a few questions, which resulted in a beautiful conversation on her work, her motivation and her passion for creating the weird, wonderful and thoughtful. Read on and find out all about Goodie, and enjoy!

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Taking it from the top! When did you first start drawing and painting, and when was the moment you realized that you were, in fact, an “artist”?

Hello! I have been drawing since I was able to hold a pencil, and painting since I discovered it when I was young as well. I haven’t stopped painting and drawing since then, and have continued to expand my vocabulary of mediums out of curiosity as they’ve crept onto the horizon. ‘Art’ has always been my way of processing the world, and a way of finding meaning. Something only has meaning if you imbue it with meaning.

I’ve often thought that I wouldn’t know how to exist in the current structure of society without art.

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Growing up in Canberra – how did the location of your youth influence you creatively? When did you move down to Melbourne from Canberra? What did you find that Melbourne offered, that Canberra didn’t – and visa versa?

Growing up in Canberra was great; smaller artistic scenes for sure, but once you find them it’s like family, and collaboration comes easy. Things are mellow … I spent a lot of time just walking around, and Canberra is really good for that – there’s hardly anyone around at night, and there’s vast areas of bush bordering suburban streets and drain networks – which allows for a lot of reflective thought. Plus there is a brilliant system of legal walls throughout Canberra, which really helped me out when I wanted to start painting bigger. I moved to Melbourne at the beginning of 2014 after visiting a handful of times.

Melbourne is a sensory theme park: a big city, a huge art scene, just generally more of everything, and the public transport is incredible. But, like Canberra, it is really inviting to just walk around. I catch trains for no reason but to get lost, I loved exploring the city or just being on Swanston street.

The art scene in Melbourne is vast, but once you find some people on a similar wavelength to you it’s crazy how easy it is to continually run into them and meet more people, and find yourself in similar circles, so it feels a lot like Canberra in ways. A lot of Canberrans move to Melbourne.

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Taking about your figures and characters – they’re often slightly displaced, cut away and not always fully formed – mouths missing, multiplications,faces slightly distorted – they have a very surreal feel to them. Where did this style bring from, and what pushes your work in that direction?

A thought occurred to me years ago that things are more beautiful when beauty is broken and that leaving things out is often more interesting than putting it all in. Humans have berserk imaginations! And great powers of association, we’re constantly filling gaps and connecting ideas. If someone asked me “Goodie yo, strictly in one word, what’s your work about???”, I would say, “familiarity!”.

The surreal in my work is a result of acknowledging what we find familiar and then sending it through processes of unknowing it, abstracting it and questioning continually, “what could this be?”, distinct from our preconceived notions of what it is. I love tricking myself out of the realms of familiarity, and making paintings or anything is a way of communicating those new interpretations with someone else, and they will interpret it however they will based on the associations it lights up for them. Faces and hands can take on qualities and exist in any narrative you want.

We are constantly reading these organs of communication – they are simultaneously the most familiar and the most perpetually curious mobile objects, a pattern that can never be fully learnt because it’s always giving you new information.

Faces are language – if you say something nonsensical and absurd, it draws attention to the language as a whole.

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You have your studio place down at Juddy Roller in Fitzroy, how has having this space helped your art practice and what’s it been like working around so many talented people?

Juddy is truly the bees’ knees. It’s such a fun and funky environment, but at the same time everyone is so wholeheartedly dedicated. I moved in over January, and have been double-timing it by being at uni half the time as well, so I can’t be at Juddy as much as I want to be, but even so, I’ve learnt a bouquet of things being there for as long as I have been.

The studio is constant incentive to do things, learn new things, and you have a wealth of incredible support and feedback from people whose work and philosophies I really dig.

I recently saw a photo of a more installation piece that you did up on the ceiling of a room somewhere – tell us more about this, have you done much like this before or do you plan do do more, and what is it about installation pieces that you enjoy?

Yeah, that piece is on my living room ceiling. The house is eventually going to be knocked down which allows for a bit of mischief, and I really enjoyed painting in a space I see everyday (an environment that is very familiar to me) and reimagining it, painting a new hypothetical space within that preexisting space = like applying a new perspective over a memory. Interesting how this type of thing mostly happens in spaces that are already destined to be something else. The house is just waiting in limbo at the moment, which allows for this fluidity.

If our notions of value and permanence and productivity were different the world would look very different.

I started painting entire interior rooms in 2013 for my first solo exhibition. I was interested in how we interacted with space and the notion that the viewer of an artwork could participate in the mural/installation by moving around inside it – it was physically part of their dimension. Since then I’ve continued to play with the idea of interior/immersive murals. Picture narratives that aren’t just 2D windows into these worlds, but something you can step through a door into, and likewise, painting installations are to some extent windows, that aren’t real, and defy the real space and planes of perspective they are painted on.

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You also do a few other creative endeavors like video, and poetry, can you tell us about these? How do all of these other practices intersect with your visual art?

Ideas come to you in myriad ways. Sometimes something occupies your thoughts, but it’s an idea so elusive and so far away from any medium you know that there’s no possible way you can think of to manifest it. And that’s ok, we’re constantly absorbing information and experiences and exerting them, and there are some things we can never communicate to others, or even ourselves. I like to think through as many mediums as possible, that way you can acknowledge a whole spectrum of ideas and experiences, in even the remotest areas of your mind, or the remotest areas outside of your mind, and everything feeds into each other, because it’s all a big complex mess when it comes down to it.

By writing poetry and thinking in words, making videos, performing, creating wacky sculptures, drawing in sketchbooks, painting on walls, walking, making installations and rearranging rooms, I’m just having new discussions with this mess in new languages, which zooms us out and makes us more aware of the greater structures things function by.

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You were one of the featured artists that painted out in Benalla for the Wall to Wall festival – how was the event, and what and where did you paint? What was the reception from the locals like to your work and the whole thing in general?

I painted in an alley with overhanging vines outside the newsagency on main street, it was gorgeous. I painted a funky corridor of sorts to mimic the slim alley I painted in. The corridor was inhabited by distorted characters interacting with the rooms in the painting and other ordinary objects like chairs. I used the newsagency staff’s faces as a reference for these characters, haha so the mural was a bit like a whacked-out parallel universe to the reality inside the building it was on.

Wall to Wall was one of the best environments I have ever painted in, the whole town interacted with the event and gave profound support. It was special making something that the whole time wasn’t mine at all, it was Benalla’s – I felt hugely privileged to interact with the town and people, and paint them (through my filters of experience) on their wall!

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Tell us a bit about some of the other larger scale projects you’ve been involved in, you were at Paterson project as well as Meeting of Styles, what was it about those events you enjoyed, and what else have you participated in that you enjoyed?

The Paterson project was incredible, it felt like painting in an abando does, but with permission and surrounded by such a diverse and inspiring sweep of people. Likewise, Meeting of Styles was a similar buzz, so many people all doing their thing united by the occasion. Everyone has their own philosophies and ways and reasons for creating the work they do, but that doesn’t mean that these disparities have to cause friction or conflict, we just have more to offer each other. Both of these events really reminded me of this.

I collaborated with Mike Watt at Meeting of Styles, which was sweet, he is a character wizard, and I have really enjoyed collaborating with a bunch of other artists recently too. I also recently painted a 6m x 6m paste-up mural that was sent to Canberra for an art festival in March. This was logistically insane but a really interesting project – the painting was made in the city I reside in now, but its destination was where I have come from.

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What are your plans for the next year, and the years beyond? What projects do you wish to pursue and what kind of art do you want to explore?

I want to continue playing with space and playing with what I know, or think I know, and never let anything get too solid. As soon as something becomes too familiar and repetitive I get bummed out, so hopefully I can continue to find things that are uncomfortable and strange and new. I would really love to purge a whole lot of possessions sometime and go travelling and get sort of lost.

But, there’s a lot here for me presently too. Juddy Roller is so dynamic and I’m continually learning there, new doors open every day, and I will hopefully also finish uni this year if I don’t get too distracted (the world’s a big place).

 

You can check out more of Goodies work over at her website, as well as her Facebook page!

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