SO MUCH FUN!
xx
L.
 |
| image courtesy Kristoffer Paulsen |
On a recent winter's
afternoon, Melbourne artists Tai Snaith and Kate Tucker came together to talk
about working with talented creative women, domesticity gone wild and their new
group exhibition, The Cuckoo's Nest.
Anna
Metcalfe: So what are the key things you're exploring in the show?
Tai
Snaith: Well, as an artist, you create work that's loaded with personal
meaning, but then you pass it to someone else who puts it into their home and
kind of appropriates it. That's quite weird. The work needs to be empty enough
for the owner to project their own ideas onto it, but full enough to be
challenging or compelling. I wanted to play around with the idea that a lot of
art you see in magazines and blogs is very nice looking, but is not
challenging. What's the idea? I think the ideas of living with design and
living with art are crossing over. Sometimes that works, but they are not the
same: art comes from a more personal place, whereas design is like functional
art.
Kate
Tucker: We are asking, ‘when does it just become superficial?’ In the project,
which I'm doing as Low Phat Wytchkraft with my sister [Jessie Tucker], we are
interested in the idea of curating a home to present a certain image and that
image being fake or branded – just a projection of the life you want the
outside world to see. On the one hand, having amazing design and art in your
home can be wonderful, but at the same time following interior magazines can be
a materialistic pursuit, totally removed from creating a sense of meaning in
your home.
AM:
While you have been playing with the ideas of interiors and art in domestic
spaces, it sounds like the work has become kind of psychedelic and crazed?
KT:
Showing the work at a big fancy house like Linden, we're all tapping into the
slightly hidden parts of the domestic experience – representing the fake
facade, but also the crazy reality beneath. As a group, we talked about
domesticity-gone-mad scenarios, like hoarders' houses.
TS:
Many of the artists’ ideas have gone a bit nutty. Like Siri [Hayes] showing
weapons her kids made and Beci [Orpin] has made birdhouses that go inside –
it's nature inside the house. Dell Stewart's work is a ceramic tea set, but it
is for mushroom tea, so it is all a bit strange but appealing. Lucy James has
collected hundreds of images of men with glasses, categorised them and pinned
them all up like a butterfly collection. Lucy's work is interesting because it
is like she's a 'man hunter' and turning traditional femininity on its head,
but at the same time playing with the idea that you need to collect a man to
complete the perfect home.
KT:
There's an undertone of danger to the works. It is celebrating beauty and
juxtaposing that with stuff that's a bit wrong.
AM:
It sounds like some of the work is directly overturning the ideas of feminine
niceties and sleek interiors.
TS:
The work's breaking down our desires and challenging existing ideas. We are
empowering domesticity. All of us in the show are living quite domestic lives
in our own ways, but are strong women. The show also raises the idea of what
you do behind closed doors and looking at the awkward part of living. Siri's
works are prints of her Instagram photos. They came about because she wouldn't
let her kids have toy guns, but then they started making weapons out of wool
and sticks and things they found at home… Often we create this stylised image
of ourselves online, that is totally unreal and perfected. The internet has
changed the way we present ourselves outwardly and the show is trying to unpack
some of that. The Selfie Quilt I made was quite hard for me to put out there,
I've been taking these photos for two years and I was looking at them glowing
in their folders, and I just thought well, fuck it, that is what I do every
day.
AM:
This is all quite self-reflective. Ellequa Martin's Thinking Chair is
all about reflection – she has created a chair to contemplate the universe on.
Your piece Taste doesn't reflect on life in this way, does it Kate? It is more
about an idea?
KT:
Yes, we wanted to look at the idea of the 'good room' and setting up a table
centrepiece so everything is just right. We've created a banquet, and used a
rainbow symbol to tie it all together, so everything has a rainbow on it or in
it. There's a rainbow trout with rainbow guts. The overall image we created is
totally over the top!
TS:
It is like Martha Stewart on LSD.
KT:
Exactly! It is all kind of absurd, but also fun and celebratory. Jess and I have
always been the lady at home embroidering and making things, so it is
interesting to say ‘Okay, let's make whatever we want to make and include
anything that realises the idea’, and use all of our skills in an intuitive way
to make an expression of both craft and aesthetic object. Through combining
those two things we constructed this really detailed vision. It is very
detailed. It is about giving ourselves permission to do that, too. We just let
ourselves go – no limited colour palettes here!
The Cuckoo's Nest runs from July
12 to August 11 at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, 26 Acland Street, St
Kilda.
