Date: Wednesday, 27 November 2013
ES: So Rox tell me about what inspires you artistically and I mean obviously you would have in your head what you are working on at the moment but you can relate it to other work you’ve done as well.
RDL: Well it is particularly about the beach and the plastics. I lived over in Madrid for three and a half years and I came back so while I was in Madrid I was working with more sort of intimate still-lives if you like, painting inside the flat in the city of Madrid and working on recycled old book covers.
ES: Okay.
RDL: Yes. I can show you some of those. ES: Oh yes, now I have seen them. RDL: You might have seen them. ES: Yep. Yep.
RDL: And I came back and actually this work really just happened out of the blue. I mean I was walking down at the beach and just reconnecting with nature as one does in Sydney and how, like, I kept thinking how lucky we are that we have got such beautiful, natural environment, after living in inner city Madrid which has got, you know, it’s cultural beauty and history. I started to walk along the sand and I did start noticing the plastic and coincidentally a parent at the school, a mum at the school was putting together an exhibition about found objects. And I spoke with her and she said oh, come on what can you do, you know, can you do the book covers? And I said well, actually I noticed the plastic at the beach and she kind of said right - you could do plastics. I was like ohhh... and I thought “what”, you know, but it was actually a trigger to come and actually look closely at the plastics and to think, okay. Okay, why not, you know, and be open to that so it was just something that happened purely by you know co-incidence. And so that led to me actually starting to collect the plastics and then I had to think about how I would kind of, you know,
play with the material and one thing led to another and I connected with a jeweller one night at an opening (which I never go to), I went along reluctantly. And I met this jeweller Brenda Factor and she actually had set up a jewellery studio and access workshop in Newtown and it was great because I thought that’s what I need because by that point I was putting holes in the plastic by using a pin and a candle and being very toxic about it and it just clicked with me that she would know how to sort of use a Dremel and because I was essentially doing something that had a jewellery kind of technique approach to it. So I spoke to Brenda and I said can I come to your studio and use your facility and that was a lovely thing that happened because she actually reminded me of the OH&S aspects of working and she had a drill. She had a mask and the work is very manual.
ES: Very manual, repetitive work.
RDL: Yep. So she set me up and she made me think carefully about the safety aspects of that so I kind of basically from that moment as well I just started building up these “garlands” which is what Jacqueline Millner called them. So I started building up these threads and worked towards that first exhibition which included other found object artists down at Bondi Pavilion and it just kind of happened and I guess it was just about the memories that these materials hold and the beauty that they have, the dark side which kind of interested me and okay, working that way. And just playing with the forms in the space and at that time it was a really long wall that I had to manage so I’ve just started to think about flowing them down onto the floor… So in terms of back to the question, I guess the question, whoops ramble, ramble… ES: No that’s good and it’s covering the next one …
RDL: Living in Madrid, being close to The Prado, looking at the old, you know, the beautiful works of the past and what can I say, you know, what they have, where do you stop in terms of inspiration...
ES: I mean, I’m quite interested in the fact that you were given quite a strong direction by that woman at the school and I’m interested in things like that triggering inspiration - you had to work within the confines of a particular material - do you think that helps?
RDL: Absolutely. It helped because it was narrowing it right down but also it was terrifying because I hadn’t worked in a three dimensional way before. Now I’ve been working in a two dimensional way so I think I was just feeling what the hell, I felt why not, why not because you know, making, creating, you know, using different forms why not expose myself to another way of working and the challenges of that because I think you know as artists we can often just repeat ourselves, become formulaic and it can get boring.
ES: And sometimes even the restrictions of things like the physical nature of the plastic you’re working with, you know, you’ve got to come up with ways to solve that problem. I think that triggers inspiration, you know. But that kind of feeds into the next question which is whether the idea for an installation comes to you in advance or slowly bit by bit…do you ever have that moment where you wake up and you think that’s what I’ve got to make?
RDL: Sometimes…but I guess the works over the recent years have been influenced by certain projects I’ve worked towards, yes. Well that’s been good because it’s just meant in terms of my, you know, all the dimensions in my life that it just focuses me on that project and just keeps me working.
ES: Yeah.
RDL: So that first show led to…the gallery director looking at it and then he said look I’m gonna give you a four by four wall so now you can play with that so then I started working further into the forms and just playing, you know. I think for me it was just okay, just start playing with the forms and see what they look like but the other thing that does influence me is the response of my close friends who happen to be artists… the feedback that I get from them helps me along the way too because I think we often lack the confidence to say “Do you think this works?”, you know, and I’ve done this with my friends, you know. Yes and sometimes, yeah and the positive response that kind of, yep, I’m on the right track if it makes sense to them and therefore I can keep going. And in terms of the forms I guess it’s just playing with them and leaving them too, giving myself the head space to walk away or have a holiday and then come back with oh, yes, this, I can work with this now. You know what I mean I think it will vary but having fresh eyes on it, yeah those fresh eyes can really help.
ES: But thinking about one of your favourite works of your own, any work, could you talk about the process of creating that work and what was particular to that work that triggered the inspiration or whatever happened in the creative process?
RDL: Well maybe Saved is a good one to talk about so that’s the site-specific one and it was the first site-specific work I have done so…
ES: And this was Sculpture by the Sea?
RDL: Sculpture by the Sea was just a wonderful opportunity to be challenged by the space and the site because I walk around the coastal walk from Bondi to Bronte often and this rusty down pipe kind of spoke to me and I thought oh, yes, and that’s the site the organisers chose that they wanted me to work with and so I…
ES: Once again, a restriction that, you know, because having to work with that space and that rusty pipe you know.
RDL: I worked with it and what was nice was I guess I kind of thought logically I will just wrap this around and around, around, around, around, with all the garlands and I started to work on a really long one. (Which ended up being 7 metres long.) Luckily I’m so close to the site because I went down there many times and just measured things up so I had to measure it and then I did the drawings and I kept the drawings up here and I went down there just to see how it would work so I did it sort of in stages and so I did this 7-metre length and I went down there I and just tied it on the pipes and just really got the measurement I just had no sense of the extent of the amount of stuff I had to…
ES: Yes…to have to put together…
RDL: Put together, yeah. So good thing I have the proximity - to be able to go down to the site, and I tried a few times and I was that oh, I don’t have enough stuff… it was over winter. So I’m going down there and you asked me before about you know how I collect things. I was just picking up as much white stuff as possible because I had narrowed it down to white. I wanted it…
RDL: But not only Bondi I actually went along to Bronte as well and then I even went to Camp Cove one day after a storm, oh, this is heaven, you know, terrible to say it, like come on bring on the rain because that’s when all the stuff comes out and because it was winter that’s right there wasn’t much stuff at the beach, you know, remarkably I can say yes I’d still pick stuff up. I felt like there wasn’t enough for me and you just have to get there everyday picking up the stuff so I was down there two or three hours everyday…
ES: I mean that in itself is very labour intensive then…. RDL: It was labour intensive.
ES: So now do you have a spark that occurs outside the studio that you work with slowly later or sometimes when you’re sitting here doing the repetitive work of putting it together does it come, does that you know it comes here’s the way you’re going to hang it or you know?
RDL: It’s probably a bit of both it will vary, and it might come back to me at three o’clock in the morning when I’m awake. When I wake up, you know, worrying about things where it might be a way of you know how the mind works so I’ve got that sort of mind that wants to solve things at that time…
ES: Yes. Yes. Sometimes because that’s the only time in the morning it has.
RDL: That’s right. And then I do little doodles in my drawing book, I mean I will fiddle with those sort of ideas visually and I’ve probably have done that less so…
ES: Have you done this?
RDL: No, that’s what I mean. So you know I’d like to, I think it’s a point of thought (?) to keep drawing. (Looking at sketch book for next few lines…) So like I’ve said I haven’t done, I feel like this is so three dimensional but these are where the ideas can happen too. So I will try and do that and that might help my process of understanding the forms but then if it’s working with the, you know, a space, I did this project for Waverley library which was about actually putting holes through books and playing with it onto a form which I’ve got downstairs. So you know, there was sort of playing.
Yes, playing with those ideas sometimes it’s writing you know and just seeing little things like that and…little sketches
ES: But what strikes me is that working with the three dimensional and the repetitive work that you would be doing with that all of the time. To my mind it would stop you getting blocked too much whereas if you’re working into a studio with blank canvasses ….so is that right, is that your experience?
RDL: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s what’s kept me going and in fact that’s kept me going mainly over the last 20 years of my making stuff because, well sometimes things have happened as I looked right back like when my father died and I was in my 20’s and when he died at 63, he died very young, I was doing self portraits around that time and then the whole body of portraits that came to the surface after he died was like, in retrospect was really a grieving process so that really was a trigger, so there’s some you know things in time that I can look back on and say, yes you know, they were triggers but I was so, well, at that time in my life I was represented by a gallery and I had an exhibition planned every 18 months or something so I worked towards presumably a cohesive body of work which often had some theme that emerged for one reason or another, you know. That’s if I look back that tends to be how things happened, like the very first show was for my father, I called it For my Father. And then a few years later while I was pregnant with my child I had an exhibition with my mother and she was still alive and so that was something that kind of happened because she kept nagging me “ why can’t I have one or two paintings in your exhibition” she was quite ah, you know…
ES: But what a wonderful thing that you’ve done that…
RDL: I know…I know… so that was a lovely exhibition and in fact you know working towards the subject matter logically was about my mother’s migration experiences and her relationship to me so that you know, actually now looking back at this it was quite a compact sort of theme that evolved…
ES: Sometimes you don’t see these themes until later on.
RDL: I know. Yeah. Yeah. The patterns that emerge… that happens. So this, so Saved the rusty pipe was what I working on this year 2013 and it certainly took up the good,
you know, most part of that and working on that and going down and walking past the rusty pipe, thinking okay, okay, okay and building up the materials and I went down like I said three times and kind of worked on it and after doing that 7-metre length I realised that I’ve just got to do individual ones so then I came back here and then I was, you know, re-threading them onto smaller lengths and also thinking of how to cover the space so that is why the cutlery came into it because I thought ah, there’s more length in this…
ES: Yes that’s a longer run there.
RDL: Yeah. And so that was a way of managing the length of the part because it was nearly 3 metres in height, so yes, so I am glad to say that’s over, that’s why I’ve got all the stuff now, so it made me think, well how am I going to work with this. You know I’m not going to just pack it away. It wasn’t for sale as such because it was presented as a site-specific work and the catalogue said you know if you want to, okay, you know the artist could configure something to adopt it to whatever. So now I’m thinking well how to utilise these materials, maybe into smaller lengths…You would need someone who had a really long, round place in their house. I know so that’s why that’s there because I kind of need something to wrap it around although it probably needs to be solid…I mean, that might lead to something else.
Yeah, and in fact well while I’m working on this I am also putting in another proposal for something called the Sawmiller’s exhibition which is at McMahon’s Point. ES: Okay.
RDL: The woman that organises it has a sort of a community event and she saw the stuff at Sculpture by the Sea and I think she sent all the artists an invitation to submit for it. So that’s down at McMahon’s Point. I haven’t gone to see it yet but I’m going to put in to work with that space so that might lead to just being used in that context and that might be a project that I work towards then. But I don’t always want to be so site specific as such either it’s like well…but I like that… On the one hand I enjoy it and otherwise I feel like if I don’t have some sort of structure to my year or have a project after all can I just take the year off? … and I feel like I fluff around and I may not, you know,
ES: I understand yes, same thing happens with me...
RDL: To have yeah, to have sort of something concrete to work on.
ES: That’s right. That’s right and a lot of other projects might come out of that you know. Okay.
RDL: That’s right, yeah.
So it is that thing about sometimes a little bit of structure… A little bit of boundary around the material you use or the time you’ve got or the site it’s going to be in, it can work sometimes, yeah. I mean I guess at other times it might be restrictive but I think it works.
ES: Do you think that the process at how you arrive at work has changed over the course of your working life your artistic life?
RDL: Certainly post child. Yes. And then maybe because of time. RDL: Yes.
ES: So the logistics.
RDL: Logistics and time changes when you have a kid, right. ES: Yeah.
RDL: You know the juggle of domestic existence. I mean, it’s just very different and I try to yeah, make the most of the time and…
ES: But you do make the most of it hey? Yeah. It can make us more productive.
RDL: Be more productive yes. Although I think that, you know, this is a beautiful studio but it’s the time just like I’ve got to really cut myself off from the domestic stuff. Oh, I’ve got to just stay up here, you know. Or I could just sneak down and pull something out of the freezer or…
ES: Oh, I know. I know.
RDL: So that’s influenced things a lot and then there’s my working life. So it’s just trying to slot it in and make the most of the time.