Three recent Q&As with RMIT School of Art students, Rain Richardson, Sherin Prawira, and Alannah Borg

Tuesday 20th August, 2024

Rain Richardson: What lead to your initial collaboration, and at the time did either of you imagine that you would still be in such a successful creative partnership over 20 years later?

Having organised a handful of group exhibitions together while at Art School, and having our studio spaces side by side, we knew that we worked well together, as well as enjoying each other’s company, so while we may not have fully foreseen that we would still be making work together, it is also in no way surprising. We have always shared a similar work ethic, but more than this, we have shared and grown a similar way of being in the world. A code of ethics, a set of principles, that type of thing. An openness, an honesty, in approach. A feeling that we are but a small part of a giant interconnected web. To the same end, we never set out to make our home, and by that, our home-based studio, a wildlife shelter, Tiny but Wild, but this, too, is no surprise.

In a way, Tiny but Wild, mirrors our collaboration and our approach. It is more a case of, well, why wouldn’t you? If you could, why would you not? If you could take in a quartet of ringtail joeys, and raise them until they are ready for soft release, why wouldn’t you? All of these opportunities that arise, they feed directly into our work, and they make us feel good. Our collaboration is definitely one of the ‘feel good’, rewarding ones. It is an adventure. And just as we never know what wildlife might come into our care and what they will present with, injury-wise, it is an unexpected, changeable, flexible, responsive, rewarding journey.

RR: Has your work/life balance become more sustainable as your practice has grown?

It has remained as ever it was, however the things we do in the ‘life’ part have altered. There are considerably more Grey-headed flying foxes in the day. There is a greater sense of purpose or direction, in the sense that our artwork is to make a difference, to communicate. We use every opportunity to try to raise awareness for wildlife, in particular, but we try to do this in a subtle way. We want to encourage people. We want to open a doorway for them to choose to go through, if they wish. We want our work or our message to inspire hope, because hope is an action. And hope is something we all need.

Actually, if anything, the balance is more out of whack than is ideal, but the ‘work’ and the ‘life’ stuff have merged more, and the ‘work’ and ‘life ‘stuff give us purpose, joy, and set our brains, our beings, a-buzzing. Again, the answer, who’d have it any other way? 

RR: For those of us about to leave art school, what advice would you give us on maintaining and building our technical skills away from an institution? Do you have any specific advice for students such as myself who want to work in similar mediums as you? For example, bookbinding, creating zines, paper collage etc.

Connection with other people is so important. For so many varied reasons. Friendships for sharing the good and the hard times, and the average patches too. The opportunity to participate in workshops is also another way to stay connected to either people or skills or both, if this is a financial option. Seeing things, be it exhibitions or plays or film or dance. Grabbing cheaper ‘rush tix’ on the day and allowing yourself to be open to a new experience. An experience that feeds the head and the heart or both. The chance to look at something else and try to understand it. This way of looking at everything around you and trying to see. Trying to see from the perspective of another species. Trying to see what message there is in a film (we are currently immersed in the Melbourne International Film Festival and for the closing weekend we are particularly looking forward to seeing some early Iranian animation. The festival is our annual holiday. Our way to see the world without flying, and while still caring for wildlife. It is endlessly inspiring seeing how other people experience the world).

Zine fairs, like Sticky Institute, or local markets, too, are a great way to find a community and have something to work towards. To keep going is the key, and always adapting and growing; there is no need, and little interest to you, to make the same thing over and over. There are so many bookbinding ‘how-to’s on YouTube and similar which are a terrific resource if you are stuck. So many sites offer short courses, which can also be helpful.

Sticky Institute is a great place to have your zines, and their annual fair opens the world to a like-minded community of zine makers and people interested in zines. You can have a half stall with but one new zine and see where it unfolds. There are few gems like this. And tabling is free.

Whatever you do, do it with rigour, and attention to detail. Focus down onto one little thing. Be it a zine or something other. Because attention is vivid and political and active. It is forward-moving attention, not passive. Because there are many people with a vested interest in your acquiescence to look away. Or, to quote the brilliant poet Mary Oliver: “Attention is the beginning of devotion”.

RR: What have been the most valuable relationships that you have made in your career? Both professionally and personally.

All of the printers we have worked with over the years have been amazing. We have always learnt a lot from their experience and enjoyed building a relationship with them over a long period of time, so that they know what we are aiming for in our work, and we know their skills and presses and what results or effects together we can achieve. It is another form of collaboration, really.

We’ve collaborated with people who make magnifying lenses, crafts people and technicians, other binders, vinyl installation experts, people from commercial printing backgrounds, fine art printers and framers, and many more; they have all taught us a great deal and been generous with their knowledge.

We see making like a theatrical or dance performance, where it takes many for the show to go on. Some of the relationships we have had with our supporters or collectors have also been invaluable. Their unwavering belief in us has helped us get through the darkest of times. Their validation has always helped us, fostering our never give up spirit. We have collectors of our zines, curators of institutions who have all supported us, sometimes for the entire length of our careers. We have learnt so much from them all. Some have taught us about artists’ books, some have taught us how to always laugh, some have whispered ‘just keep creating, never give up’ and given us an arm squeeze.

In addition to our art relationships, we have met many extraordinary environmental activists and wildlife carers who have taught us all our wildlife care skills and constantly teach us that we are always learning, and that the future isn’t written yet!

RR: Do you have a favourite piece of art that you have made together?

It’s typically always the thing you are currently working on, isn’t it. Either that, or The remaking of things, our NGV commission as part of Melbourne Now because it was so huge a room to fill and so incredible a stage for us to unfurl our collage forest. That it grew to include the education component was a wonderful gift. A way to really ensure that our message could be made, a case presented, a bid to say; would you not look at the natural world we are a part of in every sense. Would you not take action to ensure what is left remains, and that corridors are strengthened, that all species can flourish. In the places where established trees remain, outside of parks and reserves, wildlife clings on. To the trees by the side of the road or the train tracks. The scrubby patches, the fringes we humans have left. And in this patch, they can still ingeniously prosper. Imagine what it could be like if such areas were extended a little further and cleaned up a little more (cleaned up in the sense of litter, and more native plants/food trees).

Each work we have made has presented a unique set of parameters, and these, plus the people we met on the way, and the people we in turn share the finished work, make each work a favourite, really. Working on Ripples in the Open, we were able to flex our muscles in new ways, adding a sound collage. But it needn’t be the biggest project nor the most different.

RR: If you could save one endangered animal species right now, which would it be?

So hard to choose but one. The numbat, the Eastern quoll, the woylie, the Gouldian finch, the Purple-crowned fairy-wren. There are so many, how could we pick but one? Can we pick a large tract of land instead that supports an abundance of life?

Our aim is often through beauty, humour, and the poetic, to make people love all the animals and the plants within.

What species would you pick?

Sherin Prawira: What is your thought process when creating a collage? If I have to create such complex and intricate collages, I feel like it would take me hours or even days to find the right images for them. Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed? Or have years of experience and research allow you to find the right source material quickly and efficiently?

We always start with collecting a palette for each project. We may use pieces from other palettes, but each project, be it a wall collage or an artists’ book, has its own unique pool of images. It helps us to not repeat ourselves, and to remain focused. It means unexpected patterns emerge, though perhaps they are not unexpected, and it is more a case of you stepping back and seeing that all the images are of a similar hue or have similar shapes throughout them.

We begin by knowing what we want the work to be, very specifically. But then, in the harvesting of images, we let this go, let it take a back seat, and we see what we are drawn to. In the beginning, we know exactly what we want the piece to look like, but in the making, it is not always possible to find everything. So, your idea changes form around the edges because it is based upon what you find (file size needs to be high, even with the option of using Gigapixel, for example).

The collage, digital or analogue, is blocked in very quickly, as if an orchestrated dance. It is done with complete focus and with a looseness, in the sense of wanting pieces to come together harmoniously and for your eye to glide from one form to the next. Once you have everything in place, then you can set to neatly cutting them out, and gluing them in place. It is very slow, but enjoyable. And you can see it all come together, bit by bit. Sometimes we weave in new pieces, like finishing touches, but the base of the composition remains the same.

We spend a lot of time in journal archives because there is such a wealth of knowledge out there. In all of our projects, there is always much more research and many more collected images than what goes in. Some pieces collected in our palette are too complete and don’t leave us enough room.

In all things, it becomes more a decision of what to leave out than what goes in. Each work, we hope, is something both big and compact.

SP: As a part of my assignment, I’m told to do a small project based on each source of inspiration I found. I would like to try creating nature-themed collages after seeing your works. Do you have any tips and tricks for a complete beginner like me?

To convey a sense of nature on the page, we think about how we feel when we are looking up at the sky or walking through the forest. What does it look like when you are walking, and what does it look like when you stand still? Can you hear more? Can you hear the pardalotes in the medium canopy, flitting about? How does the light flicker through the leaves? Is the forest dense? Varied? Why are we there and why are we recreating it on the page?

Our artists’ books, like Restoring corridors, or our large-scale installations, like The remaking of things, are a bid to say: would you look at what there is around us; what surrounds us. Would you look at the destruction of what we humans have done; would you look at the litany of the mistakes we have made and what that might tell us about ourselves.

We are in awe of nature, but we are mindful that humans in our hunger for the living world, we have both cherished and destroyed it. So, we make work to celebrate nature and highlight what we can do to help preserve what is there, because every injustice, diminishes us all, and every loss is all of our loss.

On a technical level, when cutting out, say, a many-boughed tree, there are shortcuts to take (hello Magic Wand in Photoshop), but these tend to look like shortcuts (unless the ragged edge is a part of your intended aesthetic and it yields results that convey your message). Our work process is slow, and we are zoomed in on the details so that the viewer or reader, when they press their nose up to it, cannot fathom, we hope, how it has been woven.

In short, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Alannah Borg: How important are your socials in building connections within the art world? Do you think having an Instagram, LinkedIn or website is just as if not more important than physically including yourself in spaces where you meet people within the industry?

For us, our Instagram and our site, with our blogs, Elsewhere and High Up in the Trees, in the early days, and Marginalia, now, have been invaluable. Invaluable to us, personally, for we can make many small projects just for the fun of it, and feature these on Instagram. And this act of play and notion of sharing can sometimes yield something unexpected.

It has been how we’ve always connected with other like-minded people, and it keeps us focussed and engaged. The digital space can be our own gallery. Our own entertainment, when used as a diary to document something we’ve seen or are thinking about. And as a means to share what we have made, because we want to communicate with other people. We want other people to think about how Grey-headed flying foxes pollinate our forests as we slumber. How frogs from one area can or can’t navigate to another, depending upon green corridors. We hope our work gives a sense that it is still worth it. A sense that, yes, there’s chaos, but larger than the world’s chaos are its miracles, and artists’ books or work that offer you a blueprint for what joy looks like, what a future looks like, what being reciprocal with nature means, this is what we are interested in. This applies also to social media for it ripples further than we could ever hope. And we apply the same attention to detail to it, in many ways.

It is also an area we are comfortable in. Sculpting words and playing with different technology. We enjoy creating reels that allow you to be up close nose to nose with a Grey-headed flying fox or a ringtail joey (while still remaining at a distance so that wildlife in care remain their glorious wild selves). We are interwoven, in so many ways.

Our site, too, is a great way to archive all the different strands and self-promote, for want of a better expression.

Meeting people in person, at, say, the NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair or the annual Sticky Institute Zine Fair, is a highlight, a thrill. And it often leads to other opportunities. It can feel more tangible, though this might not be the case. For the main, it strengthens ties already formed electronically.

AB: How did you push for your work to be recognised? Was this through contacting galleries, selling your work at markets or were you discovered through your socials? Was meeting people within the industry helpful in getting your work out there?

For the main, we’ve just kept making, kept inventing projects, and making things bigger and bigger, in the sense of extending an exhibition by making an accompanying zine, by researching a project deeply and writing something to accompany a body of prints on the gallery wall. By throwing ourselves in deeply. And it is to this end, turning every opportunity, no matter how small into something bigger that we have challenged ourselves, and enjoyed the challenge, and found the drive to keep going, even when things are lean. The feedback we receive about our socials has, so far, been heartfelt and encouraging. This inspires us. And it encourages us to post authentically, and about things which are of particular interest to us. There are many ways to drive bigger numbers to your profile, but we have not followed such things as they’ve felt both hollow and unsustainable. We are interested in staying true to what we are truly interested in.

AB: When starting out, how did you handle rejection? Have you ever been turned away or have received negative comments about your work? How have you then pushed forward without it affecting you?

Sometimes we’ve been able to turn an unsuccessful application or proposal into a new and different work, because we like the idea and it could translate to, say, a zine. Sometimes we’ve gone ahead and made the artists’ book or project anyway, because we still believed in the project even if it didn’t receive the funding or whatever outcome it was. And sometimes we have made a work in spite of negative comments, in particular an early series of unique state artists’ books that were seen as vandalism; it can be a fun form of rebellion to follow through with it anyway.

In terms of rejection, it often helps us to think of the famous letter, which includes the brilliant, “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?”, sent to Herman Melville. “We have read with great interest your intriguing effort of Moby Dick, or The Whale, and while it fortified us greatly, despite the somewhat vision-impairing length of the manuscript, we were wondering if changing certain of the story’s elements might not buoy its purchases at the shop, as it were?”

AB: How do you navigate pricing your own work? How do you figure out how to price, knowing either a gallery/business will take commission?

We are independent, so we try to avoid gallery commissions where possible. And we have always tried to keep things at an affordable price, and at a range of prices. Part of the reason we love making zines is because near everyone can afford to purchase a $4 zine about a Honey possum. Many of our artists’ books have included a pocket-sized zine version. This component, this egalitarianism is important to us.

AB: Because paper isn’t the most sustainable materiality, how do you go about trying to make more conscious choices with your practice? What processes have you found help in the recycling of paper and other materials?

We all have a list of things we can do on a personal level to make the world a better place and ensure we remain hopeful: consume less, lobby your politicians, eat less meat, but this is a list of things we already know. So, our artwork is our way of saying, here’s what we can do. The subtext being, though we are not endangered yet, we are endangering ourselves as we endanger everything.

This was something we had to weigh up with our collage The remaking of things, which, at the end of the day, was unrolled from the wall and popped, we imagine, in a skip. We had to consider if the outcome warranted the expense. We had to consider was there another way to make the work, and if not, make sure that the work, and the message behind the work, was important and worth it. The collage activity at the middle of the room invited people to make their own habitat for the Grey-headed flying fox and all who fall beneath their care. It was important to us that this ‘activity’ was not just a way of saying ‘isn’t nature, in its place, pretty’ and continue the tradition of taking, taking, taking. It needed to carry the message that these marvellous creatures are our pollinators, are our forests, our vital.

As the author Katherine Rundell comments, the greatest lie we ever told is that the world is ours and at our disposal, and it is a lie so huge and so deep and so lasting that it has the power to kill us all. Our work attempts to work against that lie, and to offer the idea that your politically informed, active, iron-willed cherishing of that which exists is what is needed now, and that sometimes that cherishing, it needs to have love in it.

But there are things we can do to lighten our footfall further. Recent works on paper we have had framed have been made from recycled timbers and pine which have been stained to look like hardwood. There are many ways we can all make our practice greener or kinder. It is up to each of us to find ways we can do so and ways we can afford, because the most sustainable methods in the studio are not always within our budget. We have invested in solar, and disconnected from gas, to reduce our footprint. But this is something we’ve only recently been able to realise, financially. It feels pretty momentous!

Part of our work as wildlife carers is a way to readdress the balance, but this too involves a lot of water (washing enclosures, and bat wraps) and fuel (driving to rescues and soft release sites). It is hard to weigh up, but ultimately, we feel that we are making a positive difference.

Thanks for asking us these interesting questions, and we hope these answers prove helpful, Rain, Sherin, and Alannah.

Cheers,
Gracia & Louise

Copies of our artists’ book, Looking for green, remaining hopeful, featuring throughout, are available through our online store. This series of ten analogue postcard collages, with a green area like that on a map, mirrors our own longing for green spaces to head towards, and a filmic green screen on which a potential environment more suited for a motley assortment of birds could sprout.

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Looking for green, remaining hopeful, 2024, artists’ book, photographed by Tim Gresham