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Colour Theory Underground S04E04 AEROHOLiCS
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00:01Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the following program may contain images and voices of deceased persons.
00:12I am Tony Albert, and as a practising contemporary artist, I have collaborated, exhibited and sold my works around the
00:20globe.
00:22In recent years, I have also witnessed graffiti become the biggest and fastest art movement in the world.
00:30Captivated by this popular arts practice, I'm stepping out of my studio and hitting the streets to meet four graffiti
00:37artists and explore their work.
01:00All my brothers now, all my sisters, all my uncles now, all my mothers now.
01:23My name is Libby Harwood, and I'm a Noogie woman from Kwondamooka. I live on the Gold Coast. I'm an
01:32artist.
01:34I'm really excited by where my arts practice is leading me. Both graffiti art on the street and in the
01:41gallery is just a really powerful tool to communicate messages.
01:46I see it reminiscing in the midst of regret, trying to hold on every chance I get. I know sometimes
01:50that I seem to forget, and I hear your voice, don't give up yet.
01:53So I don't, and I try my best to release this pain beside my chest. Oh no, please don't let
01:56me go next. Please Lord, don't let my soul to rest.
01:58And I search these streets in the hopes that I find a better version of myself. And I smell defeat
02:02in the air, sometimes I wish I was someone else.
02:04It's like my heart versus, versus my soul versus, versus my name.
02:07Hi Libby.
02:08Hey Sammy.
02:09Hey, how are you?
02:10Good.
02:11You've been hard to track down.
02:13This is Ms. Murray Codd.
02:15Ah, I've heard about her. I've been really fascinated by the image of Ms. Murray Codd. Where did she come
02:21from?
02:22Yeah, well, she's my alter ego. I met her in 2004 when I was painting with Gold Coast graffiti boys,
02:31and they were writing Murray Codd.
02:34Which means you're kind of on the nod to the world, you're not really present. And I thought I'd reclaim
02:39her, and she's just stuck.
02:42Ms. Murray Codd.
02:43Ms. Murray Codd.
02:44I think when I found Ms. Murray Codd, she was just like a way of me, like a friend that
02:49I could take with me to go out on the streets and paint.
02:54She changed from Ms. to Ms. and she's grown up.
02:59She also has started to speak up a lot more about cultural issues and political stuff, and making a few
03:08more statements.
03:09Originally when I designed it here, I used this word denied that I've been working with a lot about being
03:16denied our history and, you know, my history through the silence and not speaking about our connections.
03:23I've moved from this word denied, which is strong in this piece, but I'm going to use unbroken on that
03:31breastplate.
03:32Despite everything we've been through, how strong our people are, particularly this one's about our women and looking after the
03:40family and how our culture is still unbroken.
03:53It'd be great if we could take a tour around the goalpost and check out some more of your graffiti
03:57works.
03:58Yeah.
04:00And what are your views on the idea of graffiti prevention?
04:04I think it's necessary some places, but it's a bit of a shame in the skate parks because it's a
04:09youth space.
04:10When I was young, we used to come to skate parks and paint, and it was another sport that we
04:17were involved in, and now it's just all organised works here.
04:22So not really enough chance for expressive freedom with young people in terms of providing a space for them.
04:28Yeah.
04:37So this toilet block needed painting, and they asked me to work with community.
04:42Okay, let's take a look.
04:44And this story is a love story between a young man and a young woman.
04:50The man's name's Yimbin, and the woman is Mayam.
04:53The bunyip takes the girl and turns her into a lily, which is around the front, the lily.
05:01And then the young man gets turned into the reeds, and the story goes that they can only touch when
05:10the wind blows.
05:11Oh, because of what the bunyip did to them.
05:12Yeah.
05:13It's a beautiful story.
05:15Yeah.
05:16Yeah.
05:26So this is it here.
05:28Oh, wow.
05:28That looks great.
05:29It's like old and new.
05:31And this side says always in English.
05:34Yep.
05:41Which is the translation for always?
05:43Always or always doing.
05:45This was interesting, the story here, because I use language, and I use language in the design.
05:51But when I came to paint it on the trailer, the graffiti style was too graffiti style for the approval
06:03of counsel.
06:04So that kind of impede with the artistic integrity a little bit?
06:09Yeah.
06:09This whole thing is about us stopping illegal graffiti.
06:14So we kind of get really caught in that wedge where, you know, you want to make money, you want
06:20to be seen.
06:21But I personally like graffiti, you know?
06:26I understand it.
06:27I understand the message behind it.
06:30But the people that I'm working for really hate it.
06:43I've been an artist forever.
06:46Like, one of the first things that I remember as a kid was feeling like I was an artist.
06:51But I used to look at street art.
06:54And my own personal thing about it was I've always held myself back.
06:59Like, I've always been on a, I can't do that.
07:03But that's for other people, and particularly graffiti, because there weren't many women.
07:11I was quite old for a beginner in graffiti.
07:16And I just thought, nah, I'm just going to do this.
07:19Just, and I loved it.
07:21And I was crap at it.
07:22Bad woman's business again, strictly for all my sisters, strictly women.
07:29Graffiti's got a really strong culture about how things should and shouldn't be, or how you learn, and playing respect
07:37to your elders.
07:38But there was no elders for me.
07:43There was no aunties, there was no, you know, it was just following those men.
07:49And even though I was getting out there and having a go, it's taken me a long time to really
07:53feel like, nah, this is how I do it.
07:55And I don't really care what you think.
08:13I got a residency for three months at The Walls.
08:21One of the things that I did in that space was I worked with a photograph of one of my
08:27grannies that was taken in a studio in Brisbane, in not very nice circumstances.
08:33Our people were taken, their clothes were taken off, and they were given spears and put in studios to be
08:39photographed.
08:39And it was just that kind of exoticism and anthropological sort of view of Aboriginal people.
08:52And one of the processes for me was to recreate that picture or that image in Mangrove Mine, reclaiming it
09:02and creating it again for me.
09:07I had formed a connection with an artist called Anna Mandiera, and she did these, like, hand lines that came
09:16down, and the lines in between my granny's eyes reminded me of those marks.
09:22Libby did an amazing job of taking our physical and material kind of journey into the spaces that she was
09:33interested in researching, as well as the materials that she wanted to work with, the mud, the mangroves.
09:41I read a lot of stuff about my family, letters, some old diaries written by white men in my country.
09:50I spoke a lot to local elders and family elders.
09:56I just tried to absorb, use that time to absorb stuff, as well as sit with the mud.
10:18So my family have moved around these waters for hundreds of thousands of years.
10:27I think today we're just going to collect some seaweed, see what's over there, have a look at some mud,
10:35go through a walk.
10:36I like to kind of contemplate when I'm on country.
10:41My relationship with this place has just been building over the last couple of years.
10:48I started thinking about the time that my grandfather spent here, living on the oyster camps.
11:02And I knew my grandfather had, he had a white dad and a black mom, so he just would have
11:09gone through so much racism.
11:11He identified as Spanish.
11:14He just decided to do that to survive.
11:20Oh, wow.
11:22Beautiful.
11:23That's beautiful.
11:24I love it.
11:25The grass and the sand dunes.
11:31You know, sometimes I get really strong feelings about my grandfather when I'm here.
11:37And I never got the chance to talk to him about this place.
11:43The first work that I did over here was about that feeling of being denied that really strong connection through
11:54my grandfather not feeling safe to talk about stuff.
12:01I initially explored the idea of earth art on the Gold Coast Indigenous Arts Camp.
12:11Having a week to create work together in an intensive environment and talk art and talk politics and talk culture
12:21and have fun and create.
12:25We have approximately 10 to 12 artists that come over to the island and they spend what I call a
12:33five day boot camp in art making processes.
12:37The biggest thing I like to see come out of it is the collaboration and it's the sharing of knowledge
12:43and information, bouncing of ideas.
12:46I came over with just painting and graffiti in the city and I didn't bring anything.
12:55And so I just wandered around and I thought a lot about my family on this island and how they
13:03come down this end to work on the oyster leases.
13:09And I just started writing words into the landscape using whatever I had.
13:23All I was interested in, same as graffiti, was just putting the work out, doing it and then walking away
13:31and leaving it.
13:32With Libby's graffiti work, it was quite a unique experience for myself to witness how she transitioned the use of
13:42English words and now into Aboriginal language from like a flat wall dimension and spray paint to the use of
13:50seaweed on a beach.
13:52Like when she first did it, the wind in the trees literally and a wallaby on the beach.
13:57It was the most magical experience I've ever, you know, witnessed.
14:01I felt very privileged and to have documented it too as a photographer.
14:06I felt it was almost sacred.
14:11So what are your plans for today?
14:15We're going to go collect some seaweed and some mud for, um, to finish off the work I'm installing in
14:22the Gold Coast Gallery.
14:24We might get some mud over here.
14:27Yeah, there's certainly a grade of thickness.
14:32Oh!
14:34I reckon here, here's some good mud.
14:39It's just sitting on the top because it gets, it's quite sandy still, but this stuff is good.
14:47What is your art supplies?
14:53That's it.
14:54That's probably enough, I reckon.
14:56Yeah.
14:58What's next?
15:00Um, I think I'll go get some seagrass from over there.
15:06See how, like, it's really wet still underneath, but it's just been, some of it's still green.
15:14And you have an idea for the show to utilise this seagrass?
15:19I want to, um, similarly make a word like I did in the original work that I started using seagrass
15:28with.
15:28And the word that I used was denied and I just made it in the sand.
15:33But I want to take that into the gallery now.
15:36Well, it's certainly a lovely way to spend the day.
15:39Yeah, thanks for coming.
15:42Okay, we're nearly there.
15:44We're nearly there.
15:46We're nearly there.
15:51The Shifting Sands exhibition is the third Artist Camp exhibition.
15:55It's a collaborative group show of the work that was created on Stradi.
16:03I just got this, um, stencils for, um, words that I'm going to stencil in, um, bangin, which is mud,
16:12on the wall here.
16:14So using the mud and the seaweed that we collected the other day.
16:20Yeah.
16:21So if we, like, look at this paper so that they don't actually have to cross over.
16:29If you keep going and I'll...
16:30Yeah, that's because it doesn't have to stay.
16:42I'm looking back at the sun, thinking what have I done?
16:44Try to figure out what's beginning and what's begun.
16:47Fighting with myself in the moment of truth, man.
16:50Why was I hurting back in my youth, yeah?
16:52In my past life, I looked in black and white on the seaside.
16:55And the colors seem so bright in the dream time.
16:57Touch it over a little more.
17:00It worked.
17:00It really gives this really interesting kind of third element with that depth and by, you know, using the mud.
17:09Yeah.
17:11Ebb tide, flood tide, always doing.
17:14Ebb tide, flood tide, always doing.
17:18I mean, the use of language is quite incredible.
17:21And the way she's done it, the fluidness of it and, like, almost bringing it back to life.
17:26The more I understand about language, the more I understand about culture, that the language is from the earth.
17:35And, like I was saying, like, I'm slowly exploring more and spending a lot of time with one word and
17:45one element.
17:56It does have to come down a bit.
18:00Actually, that might actually do it rather than two.
18:04I think the bled...
18:07Maybe so the tip's kind of hitting the third run of letters, almost.
18:12Yeah.
18:18I love it.
18:19It's so pleasant, isn't it?
18:20It's a pleasure.
18:20Thanks.
18:21I love you, Dan.
18:22Yeah.
18:23Thanks.
18:30Bye.
18:31Bye.
18:31Bye.
18:32Bye.
18:33Bye.
18:34Bye.
18:35Bye.
18:36Bye.
18:37Bye.
18:38Bye.
18:55Libby, congratulations on an incredibly successful opening.
18:59Looking at the graffiti art, the earth art, now finally in a contemporary art space.
19:04What's that like for you to see your work in this form of, I guess,
19:08the validation of it as this high-end, respectable art?
19:13Yeah, it's really deadly. I'm really enjoying it.
19:16And I'm enjoying seeing how it is coming from my street arts practice.
19:21Someone said to me, oh, how will you make that last forever?
19:24And I just thought, well, I'm a graffiti artist, like I don't actually think like that.
19:30But I can see now how this work relates to my street practice.
19:33And it's great. It's great that it can be in a new space
19:38and reach new people.
19:46Libby, you've recently been commissioned by the National Museum of Australia
19:50to do a project.
19:51Yeah, a big, it's a projection onto a 10 metre by 2.5, 3 metre wide screen.
20:01Wow, 10 metres long.
20:02Yeah.
20:03You've got this big wall and it's interactive.
20:06How does that actually work?
20:08Well, we're figuring it out.
20:10Okay.
20:11Because I can come up with ideas,
20:14but there's a digital team
20:18that are doing all the codes to make stuff work.
20:38So I'm doing an interactive artwork
20:42that's projected in the gallery for First Nations.
20:46It's going to be part of the new refurbishment of the gallery,
20:50the National Museum of Australia.
20:55This project's really interesting
20:58because I've been collaborating with designers.
21:01Yeah, that's better.
21:02And increase the contrast.
21:07The project at the NMA has come to me
21:11at a time when I'd just started doing my earth art practice
21:16and I wasn't sure how it was going to fuse with my graffiti art.
21:20But through the process of working in consultation
21:25with the traditional owners,
21:27I was able to just naturally see how my graffiti
21:32and my use of spray cans can communicate
21:36about country and the land
21:40and the work that I'm doing on country
21:43with natural materials
21:45is really influencing the way I'm seeing colour and form.
21:49But it's this other layer that comes in over the top
21:53which changes the whole design
21:55because that was created in spray paint.
21:58So see how you've got all these nice edges?
21:59Yeah.
22:00You can keep those.
22:00You don't have to make them...
22:02So you just do this exactly the same.
22:04So the idea is you're keeping within
22:06that spray paint kind of texture.
22:09I really want to...
22:10I don't want to lose all that.
22:12Yeah.
22:13Like, so we can...
22:14I can go...
22:15I want these lines to go raw.
22:17It's such a fascinating process.
22:20We're going to go talk to the programmer now.
22:25Andrew's taken the original brushwork
22:29and now is trying to put those strokes
22:31on top of a line that's drawn on the screen.
22:34So that's the underlying mesh.
22:37We don't know what the final artwork might look like
22:40because it's going to emerge
22:41based on people being in the space.
22:43But if there's 10 people in the space
22:45or one person in the space,
22:46what will it look like?
22:47And we've got to work out how we get from
22:50a scenario where there's no one there
22:51to a massive school group.
22:53So with the interactive,
22:54there's a possibility of someone walking through
22:57that actually triggers the river.
22:59Yeah.
22:59It could be the person.
23:01Yeah, that's true.
23:01And that's a very...
23:02That would be very analogue
23:03because they might stop
23:03and then the river would stop drawing
23:04and they keep walking
23:06and then...
23:06Yeah.
23:07There's lots of ways.
23:17Being a graffiti artist,
23:19it wasn't really an issue for me
23:21about the scale of the work.
23:32It's a new work
23:33and always with my new works,
23:35I don't know what it's going to be like
23:37until I see it.
23:44This work will be in the gallery
23:46for 10 years, we hope.
23:47That's the aim, yeah.
23:51You might need to change the colours
23:53of those in the world.
23:55It's sort of just like a new form
23:58of public art in a way.
24:00It does feel like a public art piece,
24:02but it just happens to be in a gallery
24:04and it's living and it's moving.
24:14I want the visitors
24:15to experience the work
24:18from an emotional space
24:20and be connected to the form
24:22as if on country.
24:36I can see how my graffiti practice
24:39and my earth arts practice
24:41is merging.
24:49I hope that I can just keep continuing
24:52to explore and tell stories
24:55through being an artist
24:57and connecting with people,
25:00understanding more about culture.
25:06It's been a process of working out
25:09how it all comes together,
25:10but I've been trying all these new disciplines
25:13and new ways of telling my story,
25:17but I'm still Ms. Murray Codd.
25:43I just want to express
25:46what's on my mind.
25:49I just want to express
25:50want to impress
25:51when I take my place in line.
25:54So come on
25:55and stop wasting your time.