Hi everyone, welcome to another virtual highlights tour at the National Portrait Gallery. I am so excited about today's conversation. I am going to introduce you to two of the loveliest humans you could hope to meet and two fabulous artists. But before we get underway, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I'm broadcasting from today. We are on the unceded lands of the Ngambri and the Ngunnawal peoples here in Canberra, Australia. And I'd like to acknowledge any First Nations people who are joining us for the program today and acknowledge that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. So let me without any more delays introduce you to Will and Garrett Huxley. Thank you so much for joining us today, guys.
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
You look absolutely gorgeous as always.
Thank you. Just a little bit of midday sparkle. Everybody lives a bit better than their lives.
Guys, would you like to maybe introduce yourselves to the people today and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yeah, we'll just start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the Wurundjeri land of the Kulin Nation where we are today and pay respects to the eldest past, present and emerging. And we acknowledge this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. So we are Huxleys. Thank you. I'm Garrett. I'm Will. And we kind of like we sort of refer to ourselves as gay terrorists or like but we're kind of multidisciplinary artists who kind of like to saturate all the mediums with a surreal kind of queer joy that we hope brings some sort of magic or escapism because life can be quite dark and quite challenging. And this fantasy world that we created was a way for us to feel comfortable as being very different from where we came from, but also bringing that joy and that that weirdness to people to hope to give them like the fantasy. Yeah. We use costume and photography and video work and we make everything ourselves together. And yeah, we just have been on this crazy journey and we never thought that we would end up being where we are and what we're doing. But we're really hard to get here. I'm not sure if everybody's familiar with your work, but they may also not be familiar with your faces because quite often when you're performing, we don't actually get to see your beautiful faces. We get to see your beautiful costumes and your beautiful masks and your amazing makeup.
So maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you first met and how this kind of journey of discovering this amazing art form came to be.
Well, we've been together now like almost 18 years. Congratulations. And we were both working as independent artists. We both studied photography and I studied filmmaking and photography and we both sort of working away at independent practices and we met and fell in love. Garrett worked in a video store and I would try and look at like art house films and try and make an impression. But Garrett was actually my first relationship with a man. So it was really special. It was just like a really healing and kind of special thing for me to meet someone that I admired and loved art. And our first kind of meetings we talked about Leigh Bowery and Kate Bush and Grace Jones and John Waters and all these like things that I've been searching for someone that loved the same things. And I think it was just a really special. Yeah. And I studied up in Queensland at the Queensland College of Art. I was doing photography and then I came down to Melbourne and met Will and we were together probably like eight years before we collaborated together. Someone asked us to do a project at the Bakehouse Studios to make a mural. And so we made that and something happened when we worked together. It just kind of like was bigger and more colourful. And so the whole thing of us starting and being called the Huxleys is quite accidental. It just kind of happened. I know that sounds weird but people just you know saying oh we've seen that mural there. Can you bring that to life? Can you do a stage show of this? And we're like okay sure. And then people were like oh the Huxleys are here and we were like who are they? So the whole thing is just us kind of creating and making more work and going along for this like ride really. Yeah. Garrett took on my surname. We're not married because we don't necessarily believe in the concept of marriage but we have a light. I guess you know it was a sign when the plebiscite was happening. We were so kind of upset by that and we showed solidarity for our love. Garrett just took on my surname and then people started calling us the Huxleys and we just went with it. But a journey that we've been on has been a lot about saying yes. And just like challenging ourselves and laughing and just having a sense of humour saying we may not be the best at that but let's try and do that. And there are things that like performance wise we're not trained. I always wanted to be a performer when I was a little kid and I went to I did do some performing. I went to WAPA in WA briefly. But the performing and the costume making and stuff is just all stuff that we have just taught ourselves or challenged ourselves to do. And when we started working together I think it brought a lot of um there was like no one to say no. It was like I always had this thing that you just in the in life if someone believes in you. It doesn't matter who that person is. They give you the permission to say yes you can do this. You know to have that trust and that sometimes it comes from like a university or it can come from a friend or a lover. And where they just say I believe in you and you can do this and you can do anything that you really want to do. And not being afraid of failure is a really like because there are a lot of failures we've had. And I think that's really valuable. And when we do fail we laugh. And I think humour is so vital. Growing up being I grew up in WA and it was a very homophobic kind of environment. I had a really tough time at school. And it was like only through humour and trying to make people laugh that was kind of a way to survive. And I think we put a lot of humour and joy into our work. And I think the like you mentioned the masks and hiding our faces. A lot of that was to do with having confidence to do what we do, to get out on stage and perform. Being Will and Garrett as we are now is quite confronting. That's why we're wearing a little bit of sequin. But we don't often do that because there's a freedom that comes with being anonymous and wearing masks. You can be we always say it takes away gender and it takes away class. It takes away race. You can be an object and an artwork. And it's very freeing. And it gives us confidence. And that's the same with the makeup as well. It's almost like an armour or a shield. And you feel more like a more realised version of yourself. Yeah, I find it more interesting when you don't have a face or you know, so when you're just walking around or people interact with you, you just see their minds. You know, most people want to know what you are or what gender you are, which is interesting. But some people just go with it and they're quite happy that you're this object moving about. They're often trying it when we're performing in public spaces. It's often I sort of straight men that are really confronted and "oh, you a chick or a dude?" And it just creates the purpose. Like the idea of our work is freedom. When you take away those binaries. It's this beautiful place you can play in where you don't have to be put in a box. And growing up I was always more feminine and always attracted to my friends were all women. And femininity has always been a sense of power and strength for me. And always in my life, people have tried to say, take that away and say "oh, call me a girl" or say like as if it's a negative thing. And I think for me, it's always been a joyful, powerful thing. And women have always inspired us. So we do play with gender in that way. But we kind of like to take it away completely. So there is this sense of you can be anything. Yeah, that's an interesting point actually though, Garrett, that you made about removing the face. And obviously we're at the National Portrait Gallery here. So there may be some people of the audience going "oh, we don't have any faces in these images" but these personas and these costumes and everything that you're creating is so personal, so deeply personal to both of you. Could we argue maybe that a lot of this work is the self-portrait of the two of you together? I think it is. And there's this mirrored thing that we use in our work. I've kind of felt like I found a soulmate and Garrett, like a mirror to have this beautiful mirror to have that makes you feel okay and makes you feel special. And the work is always personal for us because it's this exploration of when you haven't been able to express yourself growing up, it's so you feel so constricted. And the work that we do is like this, it's almost like an exorcism of all the times where I wasn't allowed to be queer. Yeah, it builds up like a volcano, you're like "watch out". When I was a kid, I was even when you wore a pink t-shirt or shorts above the knee. And I just, I was so, you kind of hide yourself. And as particularly as boys, I wasn't into sport or anything like that. And it's so hard to hide those things and it takes a real toll. And so this work, there's that great thing that Freud said, which was the idea of the return of the repressed. And it comes back in a monstrous form. And I feel like that's kind of what our artwork is. It's this monstrous explosion of being different and how that feels in a culture that doesn't necessarily always support difference. We're in a culture that is very much about, has often been about sport and athleticism and art has never been celebrated enough as it should be in Australia. And also, you know, Garrett was in the Gold Coast, or Queensland, and I was in WA. And the 80s and 90s were very, the culture was quite backwards then, if you were different. Things have changed a lot now, which is good. But I think our work is about celebrating that love that was kind of, we didn't see around us when we were growing up. You had to look to magazines and other artists. And we've always said that art saved us. So when you didn't have friends or you didn't feel you fit in, you could find it in a song or a magazine or a countdown. Seeing like David Bowie as a kid or Prince or, you know, the pictures of Cindy Sherman, where she was just creating all these amazing characters. I once saw a picture of Cindy Sherman's weekroom and I was like, that is so cool. And just the idea that you don't have to accept what, you know, the limitations of who you are or what you're given, you can actually dream outside of that if you don't feel, yeah, and people like Bowie or Boy George, even someone like Grace Jones playing with that, those incredible characters and power was really formative and character-scovered Lee Bowie. And that was the reason, one of the reasons you went to London when you were a... Yeah, I left the Gold Coast, went straight to London about 1990 and had a great time there for a couple of years. Saw a lot of my heroes I was seeing in like the Face and ID magazine. And Saw Lee Bowie and Martha Clark performed and went to those clubs. But I think what's interesting now about Australia is we, because we travel a lot around Australia and we go to places like Canberra and Brisbane and Perth and there's young kids there that we perform with all coming to contact with and they don't feel like they have to move anymore. So that's a really lovely... Yeah, that's incredible, isn't it? Yeah, it feels really beautiful that they don't feel like they have to leave in order to get what they want or to feel validated, I guess. It just spent a month in Brisbane and it was just a really warm response to what we were doing. I lived in Brisbane briefly because I studied up there and it was not warm. I guess it was hot, but it was definitely not a good place to be if you're not different. But it's been really beautiful going back and seeing how open and how times change so quickly. One thing in our art that we love to do is we're both heavily inspired by surrealism and Dada and that kind of idea that there is no right or wrong or... Like a lot of those incredible surrealists like people like Max D'Anne, Saw Lee and I were carrying them, they were creating artworks that were just dreamscapes or you didn't have to say is what is that thing, what is that object. It's such a sense of joy when you don't have to name something. And there was the idea that there is no end or beginning or no right or wrong to something you could be. Some of my favourite moments when we're performing or we've been at the art gallery is actually walking home or walking to the car in these costumes because it becomes more surreal, you're on the street and you're part of everyday life and that's when really strange things happen and that's kind of my favourite bit. People are always saying what are you? Just let go. It's about it saying confused. It's actually really nice to not have to know what something is or sometimes watching a film like a David Lynch film or something where you don't necessarily know what's happening. It's so your mind kind of opens and you go to places that you wouldn't normally go because you use your imagination. We touched a little bit on that revisiting of places that perhaps weren't so friendly for you when you were growing up. There's a really lovely sequence of images that you've done of sort of taking back or reclaiming some of those amazing old postcards and we've acquired a couple of them into our collection. I'm wondering if you might be able to tell us a little bit about how this works in your work? Yeah, so as we talked about the places that we came from, this project was this kind of beautiful way of finding peace with struggling fitting in so being like a total fish out of water I guess in a sense and you know over emphasizing the difference of how you might feel in those environments. Kind of like the idea growing up I loved to film Edward Scissorhands and I always loved how the Edward Scissorhands character was at complete odds with that pastoral suburbia and growing up in the suburbs of Perth and the Gold Coast you felt like even if it wasn't just visual insight you felt like you're a total alien and so this series we went actually went back to the Gold Coast and Perth and searched for vintage postcards which was actually a really fun process and then found a way we photographed ourselves make costumes and wigs and make up and photographed ourselves and then put ourselves into these places as a real like signifier of how you felt really. Yeah it's interesting thinking back to those times because they were quite the hard times growing up as a kid back then you were just bullied constantly but there's an interesting part of you that can't stop expressing yourself when you're that age as well so it's like you're drawing more attention to yourself and you're saying I don't belong here you know like I'm not part of this you know and so you're creating this kind of attention almost to yourself which is really interesting like we used to have Goths in school and I don't think anyone in Australia does Goths like quite like Brook Queensland for some reason because it's so hot. We used to have everything called beach games and all the Goths would just pick beach games and just walk along the beach with umbrellas. I love that so much. Yeah it's very theatrical and it's like this big sign saying like I'm not you know screw you I'm not part of it so yeah I had this experience at school where I I tried to fit in for a while like I thought I have to buy all the selfie clothes and I have to look like so I had these like but my my mum was like oh yeah go buy some selfie clothes and I chose this like purple billaubon tracksuit with applique dolphins and it's still wrong but I tried to fit in and it actually didn't help me at all so in the end I was like like fuck you I'm not fitting in I'm gonna go the complete opposite and I wore my clothes I wore like 70s clothes and I wore my mum's old flares and I just like I thought if I'm not gonna fit in I'm gonna be as spectacularly different as possible and I've got teased every day school when I've ever enjoyed school like I mean I I just I like sort of retreated into myself and my loved art and music and stuff but I you just you can't hide it it's not a good idea to hide who you are because if you do it's still not gonna you're still not gonna make it you're not gonna be happy and and um these images are like going back to Perth and Queensland and and finding humour and joy and being different and and the ones that you acquired by the National Portrait Gallery the small town boy they're cool and they join at the heart because from either side of this country we found each other you know and growing up I would have been so um they would have been so special to meet someone like Garrett because I felt so lonely and and this image it shows the joining of how that feels to find a kindred spirit and even though we were miles away from each other in these postcards we're connected because we are different and and the image and we're holding the Bronsky Peak small town boy vinyl that song is all about about a boy in a small town that has to leave because his family rejects them in his community and it's a really powerful like it's one of the most powerful queer songs I can think of and we both love that and the video is an incredible video if you haven't seen it it's um it's Jimmy Somerville leaving and singing this song it's really sad I love disco songs actually quite sad it's there's this beautiful contrast between the disco beat and the sadness behind it and but we're both carrying that album that means a lot to us that's a nice segue actually into the influence of music on your life and your work that comes through so strongly even just in a few of the names that you mentioned Kate Bush, David Bowie but there's Prince but there's a whole bunch a whole genre of artists that you really resonate with and a lot of your performances music is really integral to that can you have a little chat about the influence of music on your work? I think when we were kids the thing that we were had access to was something like countdown or rage and I used to stay up at night and watch rage and that was the first time I saw David Bowie and Molly Meldrum was so influential in introducing camp to Australia yes he's got a lot to ask for we need to thank him for a lot as well yeah but that's where Garrett saw Boy George but actually went to see Boy George yeah saw Boy George when he came out so I think those people they kind of shone you know they were shining in this land and even though you're like nine or ten you just know you know you know what you like and what you feel like as well so I think that's why they became so important to us these heroes like Nina Hargan, Boy George, Pete Burns, you know David Bowie and Grace Jones they just you know they really stood out to us and they became important figures so like seeing David Bowie maybe feel not so alone because I've had there's something to dream of like somewhere out of where I was and that those heroes are so important and seeing that like someone like Lee Bowie who was actually from Victoria and we you know grew up in Australia and then left and created this incredible world where those people are like these we call them like shining beacons like luminaries that we are like there is an alternative to to what we see around us yeah because we're you know there's nothing around you especially when we were younger and you know people that were younger before that that really you know you can't really see anything like you or anything around you so these are the you know you catch it in movies and the little glimpses but you when you were young you had your work really cut out for you to kind of find those people I remember seeing Iggy Pop on TV when I was sitting and he was like shirtless and leather pants screaming and blood on him like it was just such anarchy and chaos and joy and I was like that person it's just like I want to be like that and and I remember one of I saw the documentary in Bed with Madonna when I was like I must have been remember that I was obsessed with that too for me it was one of the first times that I saw queer people interacting and and laughing and being joyful and being sexy in her in the behind the scenes I was I was obsessed with those dancers and and also just her being this spectacle of of sex and excitement and at that time a lot of her work was kind of quite queer and I just stuff like that makes a huge impact on you know it makes you feel like um you're yeah that there are communities out there for you and it took us a while to find those but they're so important and and art all that artwork you know the pictures of Robert Maplefield I saw in the art gallery of WA that just blew my mind and I was like what is this dark sexy world where is it I mean to find and it just keeps you dreaming because if you don't have hope you can get really stifled in small places where you where you're not accepted so all that music can really fit into and when we make costumes or make photos we're always playing music so each one sound track or like a costume we're like oh that's rocksy music that costume because that's what we want to listen to when we made it um we have a emu who only listened to Susie Sue yeah it's just so important and and yeah she's a goth emu um that probably leads into the other work that we've acquired here at the portugese which is uh video clip a style over substance can you describe this work for us yeah so style over substance was the story of uh it's actually taken but that that idea was taken from a quote by Oscar Wilde who said in matters of grave importance style not sincerity is the vital thing and I always thought that was really funny and our work is so over the top and you know I love the idea that it's like a bit of a joke that it's style over substance because it means so much to us um but it is very like I think a lot of people it took it took us a long time to be taken seriously and and not that we want to be taken seriously but our art to be taken seriously because people think oh you're just having a good time uh but there's so much work and thought that goes into it but it does look like it's you know like extravagant fun uh but the the song style of a substance is us telling the story of growing up as these queer different kids looking for looking for this magical world and and the song is about finding that and we filmed on a lot of locations for this video that it coincides with a photographic series called places of worship which was us in our costumes finding the beauty and joy in the natural world which is often so extravagant the colors and flowers and animals and creatures so have such a set greater sense of freedom than we do as boys growing up like and we wanted to to show how precious and inspiring the natural world is because a lot of the colors and costumes that we make are inspired by that and that features in the video as well you know what was interesting with the video in the photographs when we went out into nature with these costumes um we actually felt more um a place in nature than we do around the city so it's something happened it's just like they kind of yeah they just fed into their landscape quite well and nature is not judgmental and in the natural world uh the brightest hottest pink flower is it's danger and beauty but as a as a boy you're like oh we can't be too much but nature is too much and it's it's inspiring and sea creatures that we have made costumes are agenda fluid and and there's just this sense that the natural world doesn't not you can never make anything that's probably as beautiful and as interesting as the natural world and and we love animals and we take inspiration from them and yeah so it was the video and the song was really a really stepping point for us as well because one of our first acts we did was a dark mofo where we did this glam rock band that had no sound and it was a stage rock show with backup dancers pyrotechnics videos dancing we had instruments people playing them but they were silent and it was completely silent it was it was kind of inspired by the john cage four minutes 33 that performance of silence um but it was like every single other element other than sound was so extreme and and people loved it but they were kind of confused but they went with it um and then years later we this was our first song where we actually singing and making music and we worked with um two melbourne musicians to make it and it was kind of a real challenge and you know we always wanted to love pop stars and and glam rock and this was our kind of chance to be them i absolutely love that line that nature is not judgmental i think one of the most um hilarious and brilliant moments i have seen on mainstream live to air television is when i don't even remember where it was but somebody maybe they were doing the weather and they crossed to um an exhibition where you had the sea urchin costumes on and they're asking who you were it was the most beautiful piece of theater that i possibly could have imagined it was so great so strange because that it was like channel seven or something they'd done yeah they they didn't care who we were they were just there it was at five a.m. and they were like we were dressed in our sea urchin costumes and i was so tired and i was like oh are they's going to interview me and they said lots of energy come on give it the best and i was just being honest and they said what are what are you and i said oh with sea urchins but also you know we look it's like we call ourselves the fluffy anus um because of sea urchins anus is actually where its mouth should be because the way they eat off the sea floor it has like that yeah and i was explaining this and they just explained it just like that there was this huge outcry and there was like it was in the paper and i was saying that it was disgusting on sunrise tv using the word anus which is actually a scientific term like David Expred has used the word anus um and then um the rising had to apologize to like it was just like so ridiculous but it was it was the natural world inspired us we were sea urchins and and but they but the presenters of sunrise were outraged by the term oh it was glorious it was absolutely glorious sometimes it's good to shock those people and i didn't think it was shocking because a lot of times we think it's quite normal the way we present ourselves and one of the one of our favorite performances is this we have we created a giant four meter vulva um we're born wrong and it it happened when donald trump was being elected and we were so angry about his statements towards women and just the general misogyny that the world so we're like let's create this this amazing celebration of where we had come from which is we've all been born from a vagina we're all like born from this beautiful feminine power and we're like let's create this big sculpture that we worship and we're born through it and we perform to born to be alive and it's like a worshiping like it's our it's our deity um and any time we take it somewhere to perform people are really outraged and angry we performed at the sydney contemporary and a few years ago and that this sort of the vitriol about i just i always say where how do you think you've got here like this is just something that is beautiful that needs to be celebrated in a joyful way and now we go back in at the end yeah performance used to be we go back inside the vagina we're like this i can tell you i have days like that a lot um can we talk a little bit about your most recent project i believe it's your most recent project it's the bloodlines series yeah so this was um probably my favorite series we've made because it means them so much to us it um bloodlines is a tribute to all of the heroes and artists that we lost to h.i.b and aids a whole generation of incredible artists was we lost and as growing up in that time being queer it was so scary but also so but such a huge loss of all those voices and for years we've always garrick and i talked about that that that sense of that we owed so much to those people and and we wouldn't be here doing what we were doing without those voices um we were had talked about a long time finding a way to do it we wanted to do it for a long time but we just didn't know how to do it right and then just finally clicked in our heads how to do it um you know with paying respect to these artists but also being showing how they influenced us so we just didn't want to copy them or we wanted to you know have our own voice in there and we found them the concept was kind of based around the idea of saints like holy cards like these artists so you know people like Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Tully, David McDermott, Cookie Mueller that there's so many Sylvester, Freddie Mercury, it was just this enormous sense of debt to these people that should still be here and their influence is everywhere and with queer young queer people and a lot of them we were talking to a lot of community didn't they were like who's Sylvester, who is Hibiscus and Sylvester obviously Mighty Reel is like was a gender non-conforming incredible disco star and was so brave all these artists were so brave because at the time that they were working it was still really difficult to be queer and it only been in the 70s where the gay rights movement happened and there was this beautiful brief period after gay liberation and before AIDS where all these artists were really free and fighting and being loud and having their voices heard for the first time and that's why so much incredible art came out and Keith Haring and all these people that were just like having their voices heard and we did a talk with William Yang and when we showed this work at Sydney World Pride and he said that what we want as gay people is our stories to be told because for thousands of years those voices weren't heard and so when gay liberation happened and these artists were working their voices were so loud and so potent and they had such a lifelong effect on us that everything I do as an artist I feel is in debt to those people that we we're like they held that they handed us a torch almost in a way and we feel like we have to keep shining and I didn't show young people look at this history that we're like we're all connected as queer people to our history and these icons so we made these giant costumes and artworks each emulating an element of those artists and their story we did a lot of research but we didn't want to just copy it we there had to be the Huxley's version of Sylvesterville. I don't know how they had opened the door for us and influenced us and we had we made 13 large works of artists that were especially special to us and then we because it just kept going we made a massive quilt with I think 45 artists on there that were chung on the wall and then we got community to come in and share their stories with artists that they knew and just loved once and now we have more quilt panels from those you know talking with people in the community and we're learning about new artists we've never heard of and we're teaching so it creates this really beautiful dialogue we we um yeah brought people sent us images and we had them printed on fabric and we had these workshops where we talked and told stories about these artists and these people and we bejeweled the the quilt panels because they're based on the historical AIDS quilts that people made in the late 80s and early 90s which we were invited by Thorn Harbor the AIDS community AIDS council in Victoria to come and see these and it was one of the most emotional experiences I've ever had seeing these quilts brought out of all these beautiful people that people should still be here and it was only that we always say it was just timing you know like that could have been us it was just um and so this project is about celebrating and honoring those people and doing it in a way that was joyful and fun and because they were joyful and outrageous fun artists and we didn't want them to be remembered in a a sorrow sad way I mean there's a lot of emotion behind it but it's about the joy they gave us so we want our work to be joyful and we made a song called Bloodlines which is an honor to tell their story of all those beautiful artists and that that beautiful era of disco where um queer people of color like they were making culture that's where the all the exciting stuff happened was around queer people of color pretty much created that disco joy and that that song is all a debt to that and we invited community from queer community in Melbourne to be in the video with us and one of people with HIV with Jacob who was the curator of the show is um an incredible dancer and curator and he he approached us from Sydney uh from Carriage Works asking whether we had an idea to show at Carriage Works and we told him about Bloodlines and he said uh we didn't know this but he said I'm I've been living with HIV for um I think it was 20 years and he said that this is so special and so important and he was working with Carriage Works for World Pride and he said there was not a show in World Pride that was dedicated to those voices so it was this beautiful like it was almost like it was meant to be and Jacob was so kind and encouraging and enabled us to make this work and we had a big performance as for Bloodlines where we invited artists to respond to an artist or a song of someone that we had lost and it was this beautiful like experience where it was like bringing those voices back for a night and and this project can only keep growing because there are so many voices that need to be celebrated and we learned about one in particular called Brenton Heathcurt who actually did an amazing performance and the NGA had a show um called Don't Leave Me This Way which was uh that was so powerful in like I think 94 or 95 yeah I might be able to find the link from that and drop it into the chat for people to see. So incredible that and Ted Gott was the curator and it was about art in the age of AIDS and Brenton Heathcurt was a Sydney based performance artist that was was dying of AIDS at the time but showed up in this incredible like latex body mold with an IV drip coming off and just wheeled around and in a performance around the gallery and we didn't know about Brenton when we started this project and through this some people told us about their work and now I'm so inspired by what what they did and we're including an image of them in the latest quilt and it just um all these voices and stories will keep coming in because it's so inspiring. What we might do at the end of the interview if people can hang around a little bit after 115 we might play the full bloodlines clip um at the end after we um say goodbye just so people can see it. We did have one question from the audience about the mixture of self-initiated and commissioned art so they're wondering is there you know is it difficult for you to be commissioned to produce something when everything is so personal and bespoke I suppose to your particular style. It's it's really interesting like like we talked about it took a lot of a long time for us to actually be able to be artists in time or like you know and a lot of no's and a lot of rejection and it's interesting now we do get people asking us to make things for you know commissions it um but we've had times in the past where we've made something and that people have no they like that and I always think it's why did you come? Yeah it's like it's too gay for them or too camp or too much and why did you ask us? We had a funny experience where we were commissioned to make a film about the sex life of plants for Heronswood Gallery in Victoria which is quite a conservative garden nursery place and the man that commissioned us I don't think he quite I think he got the artist mixed up I think he thought we were someone else We made this I love it it's a bit like Monty Python or the Mighty Boosh it's but it's us explaining that we portray spinach and we portray bees about them having sex because animal sex is much and is much wilder and more interesting than human sex and we made it and it it was so full on that they they thought it was so full on that it was banned from the gallery and they had Bill Henson opening the gallery and his work's much more controversial than ours but he was there and he was like this work can't be shown it's so ridiculous if I have to share it with you because it's really joyful and silly it's so silly but one of the people that worked there said it's creating a sexually charged workplace with the question of bees and pollen and it's so silly but sometimes they can question things backfire but so I yeah I don't think we kind of can compromise that you know what we do you meet beautiful people along the way like so in Melbourne at the moment there there's been this metro train tunnel thing they're making and which is not great but but because of that there's been a lot of buildings and hoardings that needed to be like made beautiful so we were commissioned by them to make murals and we an incredible one bought us campus Christmas which was which they gave us a really great budget to create and we celebrated the like native Australian flora and fauna and made a Christmas work that was really joyful and and not overly Christmassy in the traditional sense but we got such beautiful response from that and that was commissioned and it was a way for us to get our work into places that people wouldn't normally see it and I like public art for that purpose because you're bringing art to people that wouldn't go to galleries and maybe changing people's minds or opening their minds and that's why being commissioned to do stuff is great and we're really fortunate that things like that come along because that also enables you to make your normal work because we're always making stuff even if people want to see it or not. Now in our exhibition that's open at the moment Artie100 we have a portrait of the two of you so you're used to creating self-portraits in your own style with no constraints. What was it like to sit for a portrait for another artist? Well Sally is a friend of ours and had come to see our show 'Discordia' which was the tagline was 'Everything Happens for No Reason' but it was a stage show and artwork that was celebrating the idea of 'Discordia' which was which is a religion that was made like made famous by the KLF if anyone remembers the KLF. I do! Oh my god I remember them! Racing chaos and that there is no reason for life and the idea that everything does happen for no reason and it was this magical show that was just bonkers and completely about the surrealism and how life you just have to like there is no rules and no there's no right or wrong and Sally came to this show and she she just really responded to it and we've always both we've had a mutual love of weeks and we had these wigs on in the show and Sally and I always send each other wigs and Sally loves John Waters films as well and we just had all these connections and she just said I want to come to your studio and paint paint you paint a portrait of you and um it's kind of like she wanted to still look dead inside yeah which was such a great game it was a really good um director direction for us I like that inside and um and she we also talked about the history of um of classical like portraiture like the last ways um and the idea of the traditional portrait um which they're often are not very emotive um but strangely it's my favorite like even like even though she said dead inside I still get this this sense of um there's this purpose to it and a connection between the two of us and it brings me such joy this portrait it's very strange and and and I there's something it's my favorite one that's been painted of us so there's been a couple of people that are taking portraits or painting and this one um she captured something that's quite magical and when it was in the Archibald at the Art Gallery of South Wales we got interviewed on the day they said they asked me a really serious question and I said it's great to see more wigs in the Archibald there's not enough of them and it and that was the sound bite they used on the news and of course they did. Sally loved like she loves nonsense and she's an incredible she uses the um it's pointillism I think that she just dots and dots and dots and she just works for so long getting that beautiful those patterns she's got a great sense of humor what how did you find it no I loved it the portrait's really growing on me as well because it's interesting to see someone's version of yourself but um yeah I think it's some beautiful portrait and I love that those wigs are being um recorded yeah she also as Sally says she loves she uses the word vaginal pink she loves that she said I love vaginal pink and like we have to have and we've had been wearing this pink sequin um and she was like obsessed with it and Sally wore it too Sally we we lent Sally a suit too and then popped her in a wig she wore a wig for the opening of the Archibald all three of us looking like this because it's also a reference to Colts as well which is kind of fun if not not all Colts but some queer Colts I love the idea of Sally getting the duotone cards out and making sure that she's got the right vaginal pink yeah she she loves it badge pink she's got it we've run out of time how's this possible I could talk to you guys all afternoon but thank you so much for joining us um today and on behalf of everybody who came today thank you so much for being so generous with your stories and telling us so much about your art and life it's it's an inspiration to me and I hope it's an inspiration to all of our viewers today as well so what we might do is say farewell and um and play the bloodlines clip for anybody who'd like to hang around and watch thank you for having us thank you for all this for a while yeah oh it's thank you thank you for listening yeah we'll talk to you again soon you guys want to hang on the line I'll talk to you afterwards just this bloodlines clip is it's just like a segment of it it's it's kind of spliced together it's not the whole thing but the whole one is on our website if if people want to watch the whole thing but we'll get them to drop that in the link to thanks Will thanks Garrett
