Moves Like…Ian

1 If I wasn’t a professional artist I’d be a gardener. I LOVE gardening and growing things and watching the seasons change through how they effect the plants and the soil. (I live in Melbourne so we have more marked seasons than in the Queensland – the home of EN.)

2 If I wasn’t an artist or a gardener I’d set up a café in my house and have ten people there for dinner every day – no menu, you just eat what we have cooked – as much for the garden as we can. Mostly vegetarian but not exclusively.

3 If I wasn’t an artist or a gardener or a gatherer of people at a dinner table, I would learn a brass instrument! The Tuba I think. Also the piano. And be a half decent drummer.

Over all those years I have valued making work that is accessible and funny and musical and bespoke to the audience who experience it. I’ve also spent a lot of my time trying to break down the categories of Performer and Audience, to the point where they often collapse.

Truly I value the process as much as any of the shows. There is a particular joy that comes when you are trying to make a new work, and it won’t come together, and you keep pushing into it, and it’s HARD and you think it might not work and you get the sads…. and then you visit a little dance school, or a group of swing dancers in a country pub, or a punk band in a school concert or a group of skaters at a skate park and they show you how the work needs to be made. And they do this just by doing their thing, effortlessly, wonderfully. These are my highlights.

Mmmm. Well on the one hand it’s a bit mad and busy and an acquired taste, on the other hand I really do love every day. How lucky am I that a get to work with all these people on all sorts of different things in all sorts of different places and not have to do a job I don’t much care for to pay for the things I need? I also wear quite a lot of actual hats.

Well, that is a very interesting question. I wrote the thesis as a way of reflecting on my work (and in response to reading a whole lot of the amazing writing and thinking that has been done about art and art making and creating work in community, etc) but I feel like by identifying my processes, and naming some of the things that recur in the work, that I’m a bit more aware of what I’m doing and maybe a bit more efficient… maybe! This kind of work doesn’t really value efficiency. Indeed it doesn’t really respond well to being defined! One of the threads of the thesis is that you need to approach every project as though you don’t know what you are going to do or how you are going to do it. Suck on that IP!

I think a lot of that comes from that fact that audiences really don’t care about genre and form and style. They don’t. I always discourage young artists from being too specific about defining what they do. I’m also very greedy and like to work on lots of different things in lots of different ways and as a grew older all these things have bled into each other.

The way we work and the work we make feels more relevant now than it ever has. We have heaps of energy and are hungry to make new things. Bring it on!

Music, art of all sorts. ARTISTS keeping going move me hugely. But I am also very moved by the everyday. By people carrying on, struggling, loving, finding their way, creating beauty and making community. I also think dogs are an incredible force for good…