How did you decide on the pursuit of a creative career?
Pat: My sister and brother in law taught at the uni so I kind of resisted it going to uni for a while. In then in the end, I thought their lives are so much more interesting than mine so I enrolled. I graduated in 86.
Di: I have grown up on a farm in the central highlands of Tasmania. My family lived there for over a century. I didn’t have an arts background, I had a country upbringing. Pat and I met in 1990 after we got together I started to work on his work with him got interested in what he was doing. that's great. Slowly I started to think maybe I should try and do something myself and that is how I moved into jewelry.
What was it like to be making things here in the 90’s?
Pat: Back then we were designer makers. We didn't have industry to make our designs. You couldn't do a Scandi thing and get your stools made and spread across the world. Basically, if you had a design, you had to have the skills to make it otherwise it's not going to happen.
DI: I guess a lot of creatives might find it hard to take such a step. It is not an easy path to take but at the end you want your items to still feel precious, and yours and of a place, this place.
What kinds of objects would you be making back then?
Pat: I got so used to just making one offs at the start. But then we ended up making hundreds and hundreds of everything. I got more and more interested in this one off article, which I suppose begins to push it a little more to the art-end and the design-end because it's a standalone piece, never to be repeated.
DI: Too much repetition in our practise is always a worry because you feel like you're not exploring and keeping curious. You have to keep testing yourself, which is always which is exhausting because you're constantly trying something new.
You both like working with metal. What was your choice behind this material?
Pat: It's the thing that the metal encloses that is the material of importance. In these frames I put collected materials like old books, records, phones and pieces of wood, metal and bones.
Di: I think it is interesting to take something out of its context. Pat had a fascination with the Wunderkammer* and classification of things as a scientific endeavour. For me there's something really interesting about the layering that can come from an object with history to it. It's interesting to just remove it from its usual story, we have that story there but add another element and this way shake it up a bit or disrupt it.
You mean something like the apple seeds motives you use in your jewellery?
Di: With the apple seeds I wanted to take the apple isle connection with the Adam and Eve story and use the teardrop shape of the seeds I cast real apple seeds in sterling and hand-colour them and then set them in resin within a case made of sterling silver. A teardrop suspended in clear resin. I like the fragility in that. Taking metal but giving it a light touch.
When I worked at MONA I used to have to tell people not to touch your work Pat. They still did all the time.
Pat: Well its tricky because pieces like ‘Stack’ – the cabinet made of books has so much hidden in it. No-one would ever know whats in there somewhere. Particularly with objects that have worn and built up their own histories with the person that owns. What's inside the cabinet is more important than the cabinet.
Di, what was the story that inspired the series featuring delicate silver ballchain handknitted into the shape of a DNA chain?
Di: It was originally made for a show that was about motherhood. I looked back at how my mum was trying to teach me to knit. I was a left handed. She allowed me to stay being a lefty. She didn't try and override that because there was a bit of that going on back then. The piece became about connection. DNA is like the strands that are going through your family history. It was also nice to take something like knitting a semi- forgotten craft and bring it into your practise and see where it goes. Knitting in particular has become so fashionable and somewhat rebellious since I started this series 25 years ago.
Pat: But you taken it further using it as a measuring device.
Di: Yes I made a necklace that was very long and represented distances between places on the island. A stitch was a kilometer and I had used acacia seeds as markers. An another piece I made for my mum when dad passed away was called ‘Every minute of the day’. Here I used Pins dipped in resin linked via a silk thread to mark the minutes. I have put 1440 pins in this very long necklace. It was about how it is to get through the day when you are wrapped up in grief. It was a cathartic experience for me and it took a long time.
I guess the time element is really important in terms of trying to produce quality objects?
PAT: That is why I think our work has an old-style craft feel to it. Spending long time with pieces.
DI: Pat has an amazing patience with his work. He can work on a piece for 6 months. ‘When my heart stops beating’ took two years.
Pat: A friend of mine, Richard Flanagan said: It's sort of unusual to weep before a piece of wood, but you can do that in front of Kevin's cabinet. To which Kevin in a self-effacing way replied he is just prepared to sand longer than anybody. I think you can see how much love he pours into it and that’s what makes it a great object.
Can’t help but notice here that you are finishing each other’s sentences. Is this how you operate when you are problem solving your individual work too?
Di: We discuss things over coffee. It is gold to be able to talk things through with Pat. Even just grammatically play around. Just a little bit of a twist can happen with a phrase sometimes that will pair the language back a bit and with less you end up telling more. Pat is one of those people that can start to see the solutions, quite visually.
Pat: Answer on the way.
Has living in lutruwita influenced your work in any particular way?
Pat: Living here gave me a feeling of self-sufficiency. We didn't have the backup of an industrial history or a design tradition that you could fall into. I guess the Tasmanian design tradition was founded on people living in the bush and making furniture out of wood. I see myself as belonging to that design tradition more so than the Bauhaus for example. I love modernism and if I taught of myself as a design that is where I would go, but I don’t think of myself as a designer. There was also an isolation in the 80’s that has really changed now. Social media has changed all of that.
Di: I don’t fully embrace it. I think it brings connections and knowledge but it has a dark side. We did a whole show about those issues. There is something splendid about the level of isolation. It gave you that feeling of self protection you could just ignore everything else and work on your own ideas. Now, with so much information and imagery being put out you constantly feel the pressure to compare, which can be a dangerous thing if you're not careful. You can undermine yourself.
Pat: I see your work is more. You have this generational connection to the landscape.
Di: I think Tasmania is going through a boon which brought fantastic things with it but it also contributes to the diminishing of our wild places. It is happening so fast you don’t have time to think and evaluate all the changes we are going through. I think we live during extraordinary times. There is a connection- in a broad sense- to this place feeling that it is a precious jewel. We have to think about what our direction will be in the next 100 years. We need to think think about how we live, what we use, how we use those things.
Pat you have a half finished cabinet here in your studio, can you tell me about how you go t started with it?
Pat: This one is based on the famous Archaeopteryx fossil which proved the link between birds and dinasours. It is part human, part bird part landscape. It was discovered, just after Darwin published the Origin of Species. It is a symbol of scientific views which challenged religious orthodoxy. It is very controversial. It opened more questions than it answered. It made me think about how even with scientific facts people’s views keep oscillating.
What is your process of putting a cabinet together?
Pat: I experiment a lot. At the moment I am playing around with mirrored surfaces. I get the silver off of the back and paint it. Then I use it to obscure things, but I am not entirely sure where it is going to go yet. It is vaguely the Archaeopteryx’s shape but I wanted to lay it out a bit like Gulliver’s travels and make it look like the feathers are tying it down.
What is the concept behind the cabinet we photographed at your gallerist’s flat?
Pat: Answer on the way.
Would your cabinets be used as an actual cabinet by those who own them?
Pat: It is hard to know what happens to them but hopefully they are. I would like to think someone would put their socks in them.