Faraway, so close #1: Solitude with Yvette Coppersmith and Alexie Glass-Kantor

05/08/20 • 31 min

What does it mean to be in isolation, but in isolation together? In this first edition of our new podcast series Faraway, so close, we take a personal look at solitude, creativity and the arts under COVID-19, talking with Archibald-winning artist Yvette Coppersmith and executive director of Artspace, Alexie Glass-Kantor. “We’re just going to have to be more accountable, more present, more determined, to be open to creating space for complexity, contradiction and difference, and for supporting communities who are most affected and most vulnerable to the turbulences of the moment we find ourselves in...” says Alexie Glass-Kantor when thinking of creative life beyond COVID-19.

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Interview: Louise Weaver on creating as relating to the world

“In some ways I don’t think of my life and art as separate things, I think it’s one in the same thing,” says artist Louise Weaver when speaking of her creative pursuits. “I don’t see it as a career as much as something that is an extension of my life and would go on regardless of whether I had opportunities to exhibit or not.”

With a practice spanning three decades and multiple mediums, Weaver has continuously worked both within and beyond a variety of juxtapositions: nature and culture, metamorphosis and concealment, reality and unreality, and the beautiful and the uncanny. Becoming well-known in the 90s for her crotchet animal forms, over time Weaver has created a vast array of painting, installation and sculptural works, threading interests in mythology, shamanism, the fantastic, the domestic, high fashion, art history and ecological awareness.

Weaver discusses these elements in the podcast interview, and further builds upon an earlier conversation published in Art Guide’s January/February 2020 issue, which can now be found online.

In particular Weaver talks through her major survey exhibition 'Between appearances: the Art of Louise Weaver', showing at Buxton Contemporary, and filters through the ideas and associations that inform her tactile works. She also discusses the dream-like qualities found in her work, her studio process, how she gets beyond self-doubt, questions of gender and creativity, and what she means when she says creating art is how she relates to the world.

See more at Art Guide online: www.artguide.com.au/podcast

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse L. Warren.

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Faraway, so close #2: Parenting and creating with Tai Snaith and Ross Coulter

Raising children, having an art practice and making it through isolation—how do you do it in a way that works for everyone in the family? In this second edition of Faraway, so close—a podcast dedicated to considering the anxieties and opportunities emerging in the arts in our new COVID-19 world—we’re considering what parenting and creating looks like during isolation with artists Tai Snaith and Ross Coulter. While schools have gradually started reopening this week, the pair talk through how they make life work at a day-to-day level, looking after young children while working, the stress they’re feeling right now and how they’re coping, and the ways in which, rather than keeping a strict divide between art and family, they’re bringing art into their family life, and expanding the idea of art altogether. As Snaith says, “... it sort of made me think, ‘Maybe what I do is something I can share with the kids and we can make that part of the school thing’. So I was starting to feel a bit like, how do I juggle all of these things and have my practice and have the kids at home. And I think I just went through a phase of thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got to try and combine them somehow’”. Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Music and engineering by Mino Peric.