Faraway, so close #3: The future with Cyrus Tang and Lucy McRae

07/15/20 • 29 min

I would ask you the question, does it help to feel scared?” wonders Lucy McRae.

How do you think about the future at a time when the future feels so uncertain? In this third edition of Faraway, so close—a podcast dedicated to considering the anxieties and opportunities emerging in the arts in our new COVID-19 world—artists Cyrus Tang and Lucy McRae give their thoughts and feelings on where we are now, and where we’re headed next.

While Cyrus talks about loss and transformation, sitting with anxiety, and her experience of migrating from Hong Kong over 15 years ago, Lucy discusses what it’s like in Los Angeles, the importance of resilience and optimism, the fallibility of human bodies, and the future of art, biology and technology in our ‘new normal’.

As Lucy sums up, “There’s a potential revolution rendering in the background, and the opportunity that comes out of hitting rock bottom, despite the discomfort and the suffering, is a really great to create change and transformation.”

You can subscribe to the Art Guide podcast on iTunes or Spotify, and listen back to the first episode of Faraway, so close with artist Yvette Coppersmith and curator/director Alexie Glass-Kantor on solitude, and episode two with artists Tai Snaith and Ross Coulter on creating and parenting.

I would ask you the question, does it help to feel scared?” wonders Lucy McRae.

Previous Episode

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.

Next Episode

The Long Run #1: Gareth Sansom on painting, chance and mortality

Creating, evolving and innovating over decades takes great stamina. Art Guide Australia’s latest podcast series features conversations with three established Australian artists who each reflect on their art and lives. What can they teach us about the life-stages of an artist?

Our first episode in The Long Run features a lively conversation with Gareth Sansom. Based in Melbourne, Sansom is regarded as one of Australia’s most well-known and esteemed avant-garde painters. He had his first exhibition in 1959, and since then has gone on to create admired and debated works that look into pop culture, sexual transgression, the unconscious, and the history of painting itself. In works that are simultaneously chaotic and balanced, Sansom layers and blends everything from abstraction to collage to T.S. Eliot to Swedish film.

Sansom talks about his talent in drawing, his great sense of ambition, the importance of chance in painting, his thoughts on death, and what changes he’s noticed over a 60-year practice and what remains the same.

Sansom’s latest exhibition A Case of the Old and the New is currently showing online with STATION gallery.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric.