Latest / The Unmaking / Everything’s interconnected.

Transcript

Everything’s interconnected. · The Unmaking

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: So Martin,
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: my 15-year-old car and horse float reversing skills weren't up to the demands
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: of your driveway to your spectacular studio on the side of Mount Iron here
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  SPEAKER_01: in Wanaka.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: But where we're parked today isn't just a random plan B.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: So for the benefit of our listeners,
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: where are we parked and what's the significance of this spot to you?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, well, this is Bremner Bay and we're looking up Lake Wanaka to the mountains.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: I've made a lot of environmental sculptures in this area, in particular at this bay.
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  SPEAKER_02: It's from the bottom of Albury Road, directly down from Mount Ion, where we live, onto the lake.
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  SPEAKER_02: And the lake's really significant and the mountains are really significant to me
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: and Philippa and I.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: You've said your childhood heroes were explorers and naturalists rather than artists.
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  SPEAKER_01: What were you imagining when you were reading those non-fiction accounts
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: of those people and their lives and what they were doing as a young Brit?
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  SPEAKER_01: What did they awaken in you?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Adventure, definitely.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know,
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  SPEAKER_02: at those ages when I was in Britain,
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  SPEAKER_02: just outside London,
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  SPEAKER_02: in the countryside,
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  SPEAKER_02: but I was exploring the And I did have mountains, being near London.
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  SPEAKER_02: But I was into Boy Scouts and I was out in the woods and all those sorts of things.
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  SPEAKER_02: I really loved being in nature and as kids we played around and saw animals in
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  SPEAKER_02: the woods and all that sort of stuff, birds.
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  SPEAKER_02: But I was reading...
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  SPEAKER_02: Almost right early on, my father had read mountaineering books and he had them in the house.
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  SPEAKER_02: I was reading that stuff and then got my own and started looking into all that.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was specifically mountains?
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  SPEAKER_01: That was the main area of interest?
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  SPEAKER_01: And partly maybe because you didn't have any local reference points for you?
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  SPEAKER_01: Was that the exoticness?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: No.
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  SPEAKER_02: We went on family holidays to places like North Wales when I was pretty young,
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  SPEAKER_02: once or twice.
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  SPEAKER_02: My parents had travelled in the mountains and biked and walked and all those things
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  SPEAKER_02: so it was handed down to me like a sort of Not go and do this,
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  SPEAKER_02: but just sort of this is what we did when we were young.
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  SPEAKER_02: So it wasn't surprising that I took to that as an idea.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I remember going to Wales when I was very, very young, Snowdonia.
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  SPEAKER_02: And even then I was working out routes up the mountains.
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  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, I might have been 10 or 12 years old or something like that.
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  SPEAKER_01: This was one,
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  SPEAKER_01: I think it was the 15th highest peak in Wales,
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  SPEAKER_01: something at 917 metres there,
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  SPEAKER_01: which was around 1964 when you discovered rock climbing,
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  SPEAKER_01: which would have been pretty early around that point.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Was that in Wales, in North Wales?
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  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the first climbing I ever did, rock climbing that is, was in North Wales.
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  SPEAKER_02: And yes, it's not about height.
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  SPEAKER_02: You scale difficult rock faces on the side of easy mountains, yes.
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  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's still a fringe sport now.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming it would have been even more of a fringe sport back in the 60s.
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  SPEAKER_01: Was that through your family that you discovered it?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: No.
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  SPEAKER_02: No, I just first went walking in the mountains as a boy.
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  SPEAKER_02: Lake District, I went over every peak in the Lake District.
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  SPEAKER_02: And then...
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  SPEAKER_02: Following the year,
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  SPEAKER_02: went to Switzerland and walked in the mountains there and then came back and wanted
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  SPEAKER_02: to advance into more technical,
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  SPEAKER_02: you know,
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  SPEAKER_02: sort of climbing and stuff and managed to find a group locally that was going
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  SPEAKER_02: to these areas and going literally rock climbing.
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  SPEAKER_02: So, you know,
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  SPEAKER_02: they had some ropes and some equipment and things and I went with them and began and
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  SPEAKER_02: in no time I was leading my own,
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  SPEAKER_02: you know, got some equipment and went on from there.
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  SPEAKER_01: And was it the technical aspect of it that appealed in terms of
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  SPEAKER_01: the complexity rather than the sense of accomplishment?
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  SPEAKER_01: You weren't trying to get on top of things or to get to summits?
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  SPEAKER_02: It was actually the... Yeah,
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, it's nice to walk over summits, of course, and up ridges and the like.
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  SPEAKER_02: But no, I was interested.
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  SPEAKER_02: It's like a pursuit is...
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  SPEAKER_02: Quite an aesthetic thing, going up a difficult crack on an overhanging face or something.
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  SPEAKER_02: Well, it wasn't overhanging in those days where I went, but all kinds of aesthetic lines on...
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  SPEAKER_02: Precious sort of places which you can't go to ordinarily.
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  SPEAKER_02: Ordinary people can't venture into these places.
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  SPEAKER_02: You have to be technical to get there and to accomplish getting into these positions.
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  SPEAKER_02: But when you do, you're traversing amazing techniques.
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  SPEAKER_02: Was there a connection between climbing and art school?
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  SPEAKER_01: In terms of your decision to start that, which you said defeated you.
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  SPEAKER_01: What defeated me?
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  SPEAKER_01: Art school.
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  SPEAKER_02: Not about defeated me,
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  SPEAKER_02: but the first,
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  SPEAKER_02: because you do a preliminary year at art school and you do everything
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  SPEAKER_02: and you don't know what you're supposed to be doing or what might be the outcome
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  SPEAKER_02: or what you should focus on or anything else and it just meant I was confused.
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you're only 16 years old when you do this.
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  SPEAKER_02: That's pretty damn young.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I suppose you're thinking about a profession and all those things.
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  SPEAKER_02: Is this going to be my career or whatever?
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  SPEAKER_02: And I couldn't see a professional path as a fine artist.
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  SPEAKER_02: I didn't even really know what a fine artist was at 16.
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  SPEAKER_02: And you do all these different disciplines.
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  SPEAKER_02: They're all interesting, but I couldn't see the path.
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  SPEAKER_02: So as a youngster, I probably just messed around a lot and sometimes didn't even go to college.
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  SPEAKER_02: Did other things instead, as youngsters sometimes do.
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  SPEAKER_02: But then I guess we had some discussions with the staff and everything
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  SPEAKER_02: and worked out that I needed to be on a focused subject.
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  SPEAKER_02: And they said, well, we've got this graphic design course.
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  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about that?
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  SPEAKER_02: And we looked at that.
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  SPEAKER_02: And as soon as I started that it all had sort of logic to me.
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  SPEAKER_02: I could see having been creative and being able to draw and
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  SPEAKER_02: the design field was much more easy to understand for me.
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  SPEAKER_01: Due to boundaries,
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  SPEAKER_01: like I mean like a design,
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  SPEAKER_01: you know, design is usually related to a brief, there's a brief of some sort.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
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  SPEAKER_01: Is that kind of like, so here's your boundaries and you found that maybe easier than more?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you call it boundaries, I call it restraints.
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  SPEAKER_02: So I think most, many of the most creative things that ever happen are because of restraints.
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  SPEAKER_02: So when you restrict your palette or the number of things you use or the path down
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  SPEAKER_02: which you're going with your design,
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  SPEAKER_02: The more restraints you pile on, the more focused it becomes.
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  SPEAKER_01: I've heard the analogy about a dance floor, which I think is great.
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  SPEAKER_01: Part of the thing with good design is to define the size and where
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  SPEAKER_01: the dance floor is,
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  SPEAKER_01: but then to let the designer loose and say, hey,
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  SPEAKER_01: you dance up a storm,
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  SPEAKER_01: you do whatever sort of dance you want, but there's the dance floor there.
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  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
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  SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's a good analogy.
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  SPEAKER_02: I hadn't really thought of it like that, but...
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  SPEAKER_02: I've always had
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  SPEAKER_02: kind of idea about what
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  SPEAKER_02: I came to know as minimalist design.
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  SPEAKER_02: So less is more.
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's how I've always felt.
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  SPEAKER_02: And of course it's a famous saying in the Bauhaus days.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I've always admired the best modernist and minimalist designers
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  SPEAKER_02: because they do more with less.
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  SPEAKER_02: There's no question about it.
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  SPEAKER_02: And the outcomes are really powerful to my ideas and my philosophy.
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  SPEAKER_02: And it's also interesting after all those years to...
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  SPEAKER_02: Look at what I've done with the environmental art and sculpture and photography
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  SPEAKER_02: and design and recognise that the whole philosophy or concept of more
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  SPEAKER_02: with less is what I've been on about all the time
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  SPEAKER_02: and what is absolutely necessary now with climate change and biodiversity loss
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  SPEAKER_02: and everything else.
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  SPEAKER_02: The consumption levels we've got now have to be reduced by 70% or 80%.
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  SPEAKER_02: Well, is it going to happen?
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  SPEAKER_02: I don't think so.
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  SPEAKER_02: But we have to do more with less, which is the point.
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  SPEAKER_01: And that course then, how long have they been going?
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  SPEAKER_01: You must have been amongst almost at the first wave of graphic designers, were you in the UK?
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  SPEAKER_02: Hard for me to say that.
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  SPEAKER_02: It's just that when you left to get a job, there were no jobs to be had.
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  SPEAKER_02: There weren't any swanky design companies in those days, not even in London.
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, one or two, maybe.
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  SPEAKER_02: And so...
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  SPEAKER_02: What happened out of all those people at art school,
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  SPEAKER_02: nine tenths of them didn't do anything in the field at all.
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  SPEAKER_02: Many of them were women and in those days they'd just get married and have children,
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  SPEAKER_02: didn't work in the field whatsoever.
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  SPEAKER_02: But there were three guys in my course and we all went on to work in one way
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  SPEAKER_02: or another in design.
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  SPEAKER_02: But of course the main industry was advertising.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't feel comfortable going into advertising immediately at all.
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  SPEAKER_02: I didn't really want to.
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  SPEAKER_02: Even then I had ethical concerns, I suppose you might call them.
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  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't work in advertising immediately.
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  SPEAKER_02: I went and worked for a print company, which was not ideal at all.
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  SPEAKER_02: Shabby work, you know, just didn't suit me at all.
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  SPEAKER_01: Were the ethical issues associated with the client or just the overarching concept
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  SPEAKER_01: of commercialising your art and having
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  SPEAKER_01: that put to a commercial purpose
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  SPEAKER_01: to sell product or service?
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  SPEAKER_02: All of the above really.
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  SPEAKER_02: The thing is,
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  SPEAKER_02: I was always able to see a broader picture of what is this industry about.
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  SPEAKER_02: And even then,
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  SPEAKER_02: we were all aware that much of what we were doing,
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  SPEAKER_02: I don't feel bad about anything in particular that I've designed or created.
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  SPEAKER_02: But the whole philosophy of advertising is to manipulate people into buying consumption.
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  SPEAKER_02: End of story.
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  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter what it is.
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  SPEAKER_02: Unless you happen to be working for an NGO on some topic that's worthwhile.
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  SPEAKER_02: And that's the kind of work that most designers would prefer to be doing.
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  SPEAKER_02: But that's not what they get commissioned to do.
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  SPEAKER_01: That's a difficult way to live.
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  SPEAKER_01: I've also been in a situation,
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  SPEAKER_01: a commercial professional situation,
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  SPEAKER_01: where I felt like there was almost two people, two versions of me.
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  SPEAKER_01: There was the guy that went to work, and then there was the more joyous version at the weekends.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it was almost like two entirely different people.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: What sort of toll did that have on you?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, that's exactly how I felt.
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  SPEAKER_02: Although I did get immense amount of joy and pleasure out of doing my work well.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I saw it as design work, creative work, creative output.
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  SPEAKER_02: And so, I mean,
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  SPEAKER_02: there were awards programs,
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  SPEAKER_02: there was accolades to be had, there was peer support and all the rest of it.
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  SPEAKER_02: Wow, you've done a great job there and leg up or whatever, or get another job, get paid better.
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  SPEAKER_02: All those things were working towards you, giving you incentives to perform in this arena.
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  SPEAKER_02: And they still do in exactly the same way.
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  SPEAKER_02: Although the ideas or the work or the briefs are different.
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  SPEAKER_02: So I got some satisfaction out of it.
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  SPEAKER_02: But I was continually escaping at the weekends to go climbing.
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  SPEAKER_02: And of course, it was a complete anomaly.
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  SPEAKER_02: I was in swinging London in the 60s in Soho.
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, most people would say, oh,
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  SPEAKER_02: they give their teeth to be in that position,
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  SPEAKER_02: especially in the creative field, because everyone looked up to that.
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  SPEAKER_02: And so I had all that,
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  SPEAKER_02: and it was kind of, how do you put it, well, a privilege falling into that world.
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  SPEAKER_02: But I didn't value it in the same way as most of the people I associated with.
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  SPEAKER_02: So all the people at work, well,
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  SPEAKER_02: their main ambition was to get more money or more girlfriends
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  SPEAKER_02: or have more swinging parties or whatever it was or more...
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  SPEAKER_02: Cars, you know, clothing, whatever.
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  SPEAKER_02: That wasn't my ambition.
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  SPEAKER_02: It didn't ring my bells.
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  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to go and do harder climbs on Snowden.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: And of course,
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  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't talk to anyone about that because they would have thought
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  SPEAKER_02: that was completely nuts.
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  SPEAKER_02: Why would you do that?
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  SPEAKER_01: Was that also from your family?
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  SPEAKER_01: How did they see that in terms of, okay, great, Martin's got a great job and a great industry.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's off and fantastic.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or were they more questioning, what's he doing?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: He should be out in nature.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is not his gift.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: They were very supportive of me, whatever I did.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: My family had a very good attitude.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: So they'd help me go through art school, of course.
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  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: And they encouraged me having adventures and going climbing.
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  SPEAKER_02: I didn't see any problems with that.
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  SPEAKER_02: I think they understood it better than most parents might.
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  SPEAKER_02: But they didn't actually know what I was up to.
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  SPEAKER_02: Maybe if they had, they might have felt different.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And was it death by a thousand cuts then?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Or was there a defining moment where you went, oh, that's it, I'm done, I'm out?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you mean the transition from that world to the world I've moved into?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because you had tremendous success.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's almost like, I mean, you know, the industries like that kind of work almost...
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: before that invented the term gamification,
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  SPEAKER_01: it was about going up for levels and getting prizes and awards and bonus levels
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: and all those additional things that is quite, I think is relatively basic.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at sort of evolutionary psychology,
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: that's how we're wired as human beings to have most of us to have sort of want
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  SPEAKER_01: to have that sort of success or that feels good,
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: even if it's not really in the field that you want to be doing.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know whether that's evolutionary wiring or cultural wiring.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's actually what I think.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like where we've arrived as a species now is clearly existentially dangerous.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: People will say, well,
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  SPEAKER_02: we're just evolutionarily designed to be competitive,
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  SPEAKER_02: to be ruthless, to be this, to want money, to be commercial, blah, blah, blah.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: We weren't evolutionary designed for that.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: Tribal people weren't.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: Stone Age people weren't.
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  SPEAKER_02: That's what we've become, or many of us have become, and it's also what we're rewarded for.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the system rewards people for becoming That.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: So more of a cultural conditioning.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I believe.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so I came to believe that.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Gosh.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I went looking, didn't I?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: At 20, I went overland to the Himalayas.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, all through the Middle East, all those countries.
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  SPEAKER_02: At dirt level,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: sleeping out,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: travelling in a van in a Freetown Army lorry,
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: fending for ourselves in every way,
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: walking from Kathmandu to Everest and back, and so on.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's a huge experience for, I was 20.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: I had my 21st birthday in Benares, the burning gaps on Ganges.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you didn't get that experience in so long,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that sat with you for a long time though, didn't it?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: That trip or was that Nairobi?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that came later.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: That came later.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: But that trip to the Himalayas was pretty foundational.
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  SPEAKER_02: It also ended me in hospital for eight weeks in Kathmandu with hepatitis.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: And...
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  SPEAKER_02: So, you know,
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: it was recovery time, both health and financial, everything had to sort of recover.
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  SPEAKER_02: But I ended up back in London in advertising, would you believe?
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  SPEAKER_02: I didn't quite know how to support myself otherwise.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big one,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: when you're in something like that and it works and it's not easy to let go
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  SPEAKER_01: of something when it is,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: when it's serving at least one purpose in your life,
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: which is, you know, the shelter, shelter and food, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't feel great about it, because I've seen that for a long time.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: I escaped a number of times, but I didn't escape the industry.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: I just escaped to different places.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because the other thing is that within that field, you can kind of do anything, really.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Within advertising or design?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, advertising in those days.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Later it was design I've gotten to, specifically.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: so I enrolled with a
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: headhunting group who placed creative people internationally.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I gave them a sort of geographical brief, I think.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I've done that a number of times.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: And they came up with this job in Nairobi.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: And they came out and interviewed me and hired me to be a creative director of
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: an agency in Nairobi.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went there.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I went there not because of the job.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted the adventure.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: I knew what that meant.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: East Africa, full of animals, mountains, volcanoes.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: A person like me would give their eye teeth for that.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I did.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: And how hard was the nine to five?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Was that fulfilling as well or in a different way compared to what was going on in London?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: That must have been a big cultural difference.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, a huge cultural difference because although I thought I was going to a place
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: where colonialism had ended, Don't think it ever ends, does it?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: No, no.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, of course, I was joining a company that was founded on colonialism.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: Even though, you know, they employed lots of local Africans.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they had their own government and everything else in Kenya.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: The attitudes were still there and the whole kind of way of operating was still there.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I hated all that.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: But again, I sort of...
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I can't say I turned a blind eye to it because I didn't.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: I got fired in the end for not performing in their happy direction or agreeing with them.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: But then I wanted to get fired because it meant they could send me back to pay for it too.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't want to have to pay my own way.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it worked out well then?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in the end, yeah.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: But in the meantime,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I had lots of adventures in the national parks and on the mountains and everything,
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: yeah.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: And after coming back then to London, what was going on with climbing at that point?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Did this take an even greater backseat in your life, or was there still very much weekends?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: No, the climbing got more advanced, I think.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: After I'd recovered enough from,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: no, no, hang on, I wasn't sick when I came back from Africa, that was Nepal.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, I just got back into it in a big way all over Britain and to
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: other parts,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Europe a bit, not as often.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Mostly it was North Wales because we had somewhere to stay up there in the National Park.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: We are beaten up old sheep.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Shack, Cottage thing for which we paid nothing.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it was great times and great friends and great clients.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've made a lot of amazing discoveries since moving back here but one
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: of my personal faves has definitely been 1964 magazine and I'm stoked
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: to welcome them on board as The Unmaking's first partner.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Laura and Nathan produce four beautiful issues a year celebrating
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: the special individuals and creativity to be found
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: in Aotearoa's more remote locations.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Each issue features the work of over 20 writers,
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: photographers,
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: illustrators,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: designers,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: artists and poets and showcases small local businesses making and doing good things.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's essentially a Venn diagram solar eclipse with The Unmaking's guests.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: A 1964 subscription is hands down the perfect gift to yourself or a loved one
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: and you can get your swagger on in the knowledge that for the cost of
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: a flat wipe per month you'll also be supporting around 100
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: of our independent creatives each year as well as helping me keep the lights on here
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: at The Unmaking.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's what those in the trade like to call a win-win-win situation.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of dubs, head to www.1964.co.nz forward slash
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: So when and how did design transition into making then?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well,
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: I did another thing and got myself to New Zealand in much the same way as I got
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: to Africa.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I was in Auckland and I still kept working for these marketing companies.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: But design was my first love, but it was hard to find that kind of work.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: But then I noticed a company in Wellington.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: Who were significant in that field specifically, branding and design.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know,
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: I talked to them about it and they asked me to set up or be the creative director of
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: a new Auckland office.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I did that.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that was somewhat different.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: I enjoyed it.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: And the industry started to mature.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: You have to remember this is all before computers.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to imagine.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Bromides and scalpels.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: All analog.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so on.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then...
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember when I first went freelance,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: but I started working for myself rather than other companies.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I went to Australia and worked for a design company there,
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: one of the most significant design companies in Australia, Ken Cato and company.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: And they did a lot of work all around the Pacific Rim.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then I came back and continued with my own company,
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: a small company, working with Businesses and corporates in Auckland mainly.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: But I still had this yin to do something more with it.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: And eventually I decided I've got to use this as a sort
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: of communications tool somehow to talk about the issues I actually care about.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: And what I found,
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: or what I stumbled upon was the first eco-design conference in Melbourne in 1992.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I signed up to go to that.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: I even gave a talk.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: I was learning everything.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: And all these people who were at the cutting edge of Eco Design were there from all
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: over the world, you know, the Swedes and the Danes and so on.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Some big companies, you know, Philips and people that were starting to work on this stuff.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, that was quite formative.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Was that where you got to share the stage?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Was it Victor Papanek?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: I had lunch with him.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Close enough.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: He was a hero.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: You've obviously done your research.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Part of my job.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, yes.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: And what else happened?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: Then I came back here to New Zealand and started to work or try to find a way
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: to work on this stuff.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I tried to find organisations who had a philosophy of,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: you know, ecological, sustainable philosophy.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: And there were a few trying to do lots of things, one of which was...
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: Interface, Carpets.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: There was a local, a New Zealand version of that company.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they'd done a huge thing in America.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: The CEO had read a book by Paul Hawking called The Ecology of Commerce.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: And he claims to have got a spear in the chest.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he sort of realised...
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: What this all meant to an industrialist like himself.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: So interface carpets were the largest carpet manufacturers in the world,
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: based in America,
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: making almost, I think, exclusively nylon carpets, synthetic, almost from oil.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Decided to become the first sustainable enterprise in the world.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, big ask.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: But he was convinced they were going to transform their business and
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: that they would become a model for all business.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah,
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: so they had lots of ways of going about this or attempting and it's
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: a very long ongoing program.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: Measured everything,
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: all their inputs and outputs, all their waste, all their CO2 emissions, everything.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: By design tried to find ways to either eliminate or reduce all their inputs
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: and outputs and effects on the environment and people.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I followed that.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: I did some work with them in New Zealand.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: And they even used some of my earlier work.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: So once I started doing environmental sculptures and photographing them,
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: this was the subject matter which I was dealing with,
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: which sort of influenced my work in nature.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because what was...
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: Necessary philosophically and technically was to emulate nature in industrial design.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: So systems designers look at ecology and natural systems and find ways
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: to emulate them in commercial form.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like asking the question, well, how would nature do this?
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: And how would it do it without damaging other forms in nature and life?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Without contaminating the water,
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: without contaminating the air,
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: without producing all this waste,
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: having mined it in the first place from millions of years of deposits.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's just so vast to actually take that on.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so were they kind of commissioning work or supporting work or were you sort
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: of freelancing for them?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, with interface carpets.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well,
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: it was a
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: transitional period because I was running a design company,
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: but I would go and talk to them about, well,
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: what are they up to and what is it they're trying to do and what are they making
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: and how are they performing in a more sustainable manner?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: And they'd tell me all this and they'd give me a brief.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And what they wanted to do was, of course,
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted their products to reach an audience that
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: had the same ethics
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: or sustainable principles.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: So architects were some of the earliest people to work in this field because
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: the built environment has the most impact of just about anything.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: And architects being creative people understood the implications and wanted
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: to apply sustainability principles to what they were designing.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: So if you could offer them products that were sustainable
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: at least much more sustainable than others,
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: that was a link which would perpetuate that behavior.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was in the middle sort of communicating or trying to make communications
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: that reach the architects that help them make those sorts of decisions.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I suppose you might say it's A different kind of advertising.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know,
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: we go into architectural magazines with things that talked about the sustainability
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: of their carpet products and why they were more sustainable and so on and so forth.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like being a stalking horse for them.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that would have been pre the discovery of hardwood flooring,
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, before that became a big thing again.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because I worked for the New Zealand Wall Board and just seeing
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: the carpet sales plummet Globally,
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: when people went,
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: oh, look at this, we pulled up the old carpet and here's this rimu or matai.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they all went through phases, didn't they, of fashion and style and everything.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: But yes, the old hardwood floors were wonderful.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing was, yes, how synthetic carpets crashed the New Zealand war market.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: And we all know what sort of happened there.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: And there was an argument that I think they had all the data and statistics too
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: about how wool wasn't that sustainable.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I can't swear to that.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: I can't reel off the data.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: But there are inputs into wool farming and inputs on the environment from wool.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: But nowhere near as bad as cows are.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: What did you think of yourself then in terms of a title or a label?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Were you calling yourself then a designer or a sculptor or an artist?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, in the
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'd become a graphic designer.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: We had a company called Martin Hill Design,
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: which was dealing with businesses,
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: and that was branding and packaging and marketing communications, I suppose.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I was trying to do that with companies who had a different philosophy from many others.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: They were trying to do sustainable products and services and communications.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what I tried to specialize in.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time, I started working in making these artworks.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: But I didn't know if it could be a career.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know that.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I just started making them and seeing what would happen.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it happened quite quickly.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: The first half a dozen or a dozen worked,
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: so I printed it up nicely and took down to the Auckland Art Fair on the waterfront.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: Huge sort of public venue thing where people buy stands and display their art.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't think, oh, I'm going to sell a lot or anything like that.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to find out what people made of it.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so I sort of stood there and talked to people for four days to find out.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: And what did they think of it?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there seemed to be a lot of good response.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, most people then and even today, their first response is that's beautiful.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's the thing about art is that beauty is in some respects a no-no in
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: the fine art world because it's suspect.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: In that arena.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's suspect because it can draw people in and it's pretty or whatever.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: It can say, oh,
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: that's a beautiful painting or drawing or in this case photograph
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: because it's landscape and so on.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it's suspect because it might not have any ideas in it.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas that was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was all ideas, but I presented the ideas in a way that hopefully attracted people to them.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because I didn't think that you could get people to even think about these ideas
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: if you projected them and portrayed them through negative means.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because we'd had all that.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know,
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: we'd had all the images from Greenpeace of the dying animals and the slaughter
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: of this and that.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: Devastation of that and the rainforests and the polar bears.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: We've all seen that.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: And people just turned off.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: And my whole thing was, well,
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: if we're not going to persuade people through negative work that shows
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: the damage we're doing, then what might the other side be?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: Can we project a story that says,
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: this is not only beautiful in terms of It's actually the most beautiful way
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: to operate.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: So the way that nature works is beautiful, irrespective of its visual appearance.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it's beautiful because Of evolution because of the way it works with no waste.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: It stays waste.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: Everything's interconnected.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Everything operates in cyclical forms that produce more beauty and more life
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: and more vigor and more joy.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Would you see it as almost like a communication objective?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's the background I've come from.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: And you could say, well, in terms of art, that might be suspect too, but I didn't care.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't trying to become a famous artist.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was trying to say something worthwhile that might actually reach an audience.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just thinking about somebody like Banksy in terms of his messaging and
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: the way he does that and brings people and draws people in through the irony and
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: the humor and the punk way he does that.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: But it's all about a message that he is trying to communicate.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not, it's not, you know, it's not a new thing.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, many,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: many painters,
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: you know, had very strong messages and did activist work and everything.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Guernic is a classic example.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: By Picasso, about the war in Spain and slaughtering and everything.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: Huge, devastatingly powerful painting.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that's what I started doing.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing I used was commercial again.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because I was doing this as a one-man band,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have anyone to help me or any funding or any damn thing.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: But I was determined and I sort of committed.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: I also looked around at what worked commercially, so would spread.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: And there was another concept which was you...
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a fine artist,
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: you do a painting,
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: you sell it, or you hang it in an art gallery, that's it, it's done and gone.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: But with photography of this work, I could make it, own it, and go on owning it.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: Publish it, license it, do all kinds of things with it.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I still owned it because I had the copyright.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't gone.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so the images could go on telling their story and you could add more images
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: and create more story.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I aligned that with the concept of the whole commercial business of greeting cards.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'd recognised,
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: and everyone knew,
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: especially in places like Britain, greeting cards were a phenomenon.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: They just went on year after year after year.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: And people would buy them and send them to their loved ones and friends and family
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: and everything over and over and over.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: And they got kept and they got passed on and all the rest of it.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I figured if you could do that, tell your story on those...
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the people like them,
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: they spread them,
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: they send them to their friends, then you've got a kind of form of viral marketing.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: And of course this was way before the internet.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: But it's the same principle.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what I did.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: And they were launched in Auckland first.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: In Whitcore's window, because that's where you sell the cards, and so on.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: I funded the publishing,
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: but I had a company that did the distribution,
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: and they did that, because that's what they did.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it was successful, and after a year or something...
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: They took it actually to the UK because they were importing as well.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: And a big company in London called The Art Group took them on
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: and they started publishing them and it just went huge.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's remarkably strategically astute though at that time in terms of where did that come from?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: The concept that this will be successful,
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: this is a way to spread my work, to control it, to retain ownership.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: To be able to reproduce it infinitely, expand it.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there were numerous examples of it.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: Ken Doan in Australia did it.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: Anne Geddes did it with the help of her husband who was
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: a media marketing type person or something.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: And she did it in a huge way.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't actually admire a lot of it.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, I mean,
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: her point,
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: like you take her work, you say, well, what's the most popular thing in the world?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: Babies.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's babies and buckets, wasn't it?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, you can't go past babies if you want to sell a few hundred million.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: Or puppies.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I'm not knocking it, but the point is that I recognised that it worked.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: So my whole point was, well,
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: If I can reach a tenth of that audience with what I'm trying to say
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: and get one-tenth of the tenth audience to actually have any ideas
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: about what we're saying and what it all means, then maybe it's worthwhile.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: You took some big financial risks, though, with that, right?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Did you pre-print 30,000-plus cards?
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Was that based on forecasting,
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: that you could see,
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: well, I've sold this much in the market this size, so this is going to happen?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was an
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: economical print run.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: You have to choose that.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: And also,
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: because I've been in the industry and I've been using printing companies and stuff,
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: I got some support from one company I was working with.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: In the sense,
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: they said, well,
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: all right,
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: we'll print those for you and you drip feed the invoices,
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: sort of thing, which was really helpful.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: It meant I didn't have to fork up 30,000 day one.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: So they carried me for a while.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: That sort of thing was really helpful.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: Makes a big difference, doesn't it?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: To find a commercial partner like that that operates like that.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they were a big company and they became bigger and bigger and bigger.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: But I'd always given them work.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so this was sort of reciprocal.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: And they seemed to admire what I was doing.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: Sort of, yeah.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's a kind of a delta between being able to make something well and being able
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: to call it art.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Were you immediately there that this is definitely art or did you struggle with that at all?
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: And particularly with looking back at the history because you've gone away from
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: the brief and KPIs and client expectations and essentially with design there's often
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: a kind of a preconceived almost right solution that you're working towards
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: in some ways whereas art is much more constraint or restraintless.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to think what I felt initially and what I feel now
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: because it's probably adapted my thinking.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_02: I always tried to make it art as opposed to a piece of graphic design
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: but it ended up being published like graphic design on cards or posters or whatever.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I always felt that there had to be something in the work That was beyond
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: a commercial piece of art.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in the early days, graphic designers were called commercial artists.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_02: And they were doing illustrations or images or posters or whatever it was,
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: as you say, to a brief.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas here, I was doing something to a brief, but it was my brief.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it was also a brief...
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: That had to include a certain quality or standard that I would call art.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very easy to do this kind of work like pile up rocks or put some leaves in
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: a circle and make an image.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: Anyone can do it.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: Children do it.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: They did before anyone started doing this and still do.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: But that doesn't make that art.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: They're just plain and with a decorative form or whatever.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it's also very easy to make everything too decorative.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: And there are all kinds of ways in which you can cock it up.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: The first thing is you use too many materials or too many ideas or too many forms.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: As I said earlier about simplicity and minimal thinking and design,
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_02: you'll notice that most of my work,
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: they've only used one material and everything is stripped back.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: My ideas about the design and the sculpture and the art and everything is
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_02: that it needs to be stripped back until you can't take anything else away.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: It still has to perform without any more in it.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: Does that make any sense?
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it does.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's in service of the message then.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: And is it the message that then makes it art?
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I believe art needs to have ideas.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: It needs to have ideas.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: It can be the artist.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: It wants to say something.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the artist has to have some ideas and whether we look at the art and get
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: the same ideas is kind of up to the viewer.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: Most artists would say the same,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: that they make the work because they're exploring something and that the way
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: a viewer views it is up to them.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: Was it a process of trial and error to get to the understanding of the minimalism
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: and really stripping everything else away?
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or did you just know that intrinsically?
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's intuitive.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's intuitive.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, from everything I've learnt, sort of thing.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what I admire in other people's work...
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: Getting to achieve a powerful outcome with a minimal amount in the image.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very complex process.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: From ideation through to location scouting and first attempts and things,
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: is there a timeframe that you say this is how long I need and what I'm doing?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: No, very little of that.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: Every work is different.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_02: Many of the earlier works I was simply experimenting.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'd go out to the wild beaches of the west coast and the black sands in
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: the west coast of Auckland.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I would just be exploring materials and
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: Items and what I could make with them that had significance or meaning and
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: then exploring how to photograph them and when the light was any good and
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: when it wasn't or what worked and what didn't, those sorts of things.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: I guess that's what most artists do is they explore.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: And find happy surprises or whatever.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_02: So over years you can do all that, but sometimes you get an idea externally.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_02: You want to go and express something and then might do what you've described,
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: which is decide on a location and a material and an idea that you want to execute in
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_02: that place at a certain time or whatever.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_02: That sort of is another way of doing it or comes later otherwise.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of get the impression that meeting Philippa was probably
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: a one plus one equals three kind of equation for you.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: was, probably more like four actually.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: How much of this would have happened without meeting her?
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, well,
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: everything that happened since,
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_02: of course, wouldn't have happened without meeting her.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: But the approaches I've talked about,
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: which is deciding to do the work in the first place,
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: was my initial approach and what I did.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: In fact,
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: when I first met her, well,
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: within the first week or so,
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: she came up to the office I had in Auckland in the city district.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: And between the tower blocks.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: But there was a lovely, interesting building.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, we went there and I showed her what I did.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I had about half a dozen Transparency is on a light box at that stage
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_02: of these sculptures I'm making.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: And she's very creative, Philippa.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I showed her this.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_02: I said, this is what I've started doing.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking of doing more and all that sort of thing.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: But she, you know, I said, I don't know if I can do anything with it.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: She said, oh, well, they're very nice.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: She didn't pay much attention.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that's how it started.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: That side of it started.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: But prior to that, we had met Climbing
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because I'd stopped climbing for a long while.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it seemed like a long while, 10 or 15 years.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's a long time.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't even know if I could do it again.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_02: But when I was going through this change,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: and I used to call it redesigning my life at the time,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: everything had to go through the mixer and come out with some sort of sense made
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_02: to it.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, I think the best thing I can do is start climbing again.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I did, I tried to.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: I went in Auckland a little bit and then I went to this lovely place on Lake Taupo
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_02: where the climbers were going at that stage and I'd not been there before
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_02: and discovered that and had a great time and met people and there's a whole bunch
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_02: of people would go.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's very much a community thing,
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: like an underground movement, you know, climbers, like surfers and everything else.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: Only a climber knows the feeling?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't know.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: And there I met Philippa, one of the crowd, and she'd done much the same thing.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: So she was sort of redesigning her life.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: And she'd taken up climbing.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: She was very new to her, whereas I'd done it before.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_02: And we were doing things.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I just, on one occasion, found myself climbing with her and this other guy.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a long story, but she loves to tell it.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Not a long story, but...
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_02: Story she likes to tell,
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: which is that we three were climbing this route,
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: multi-pitch climb, and she likes to say that we were marooned on a tiny ledge.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_02: It was a small belay ledge after the first pitch or something.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: And this other person couldn't get up the overhang above or something.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, eventually I said, oh look, I'll have a crack at it.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I did it.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, oh, he's my man or something, you know, that nonsense.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: Gotcha.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you wowed her.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: She likes to tell the story anyway.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: But we just, you know, fell in love and started doing adventurous things together.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: And as well as the art.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: And did climbing reopen something in you then,
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: going back to it like that after such a long absence?
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because sometimes when you have a passion like that,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: that's such an important part of your life,
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: and then you lose sight of it for whatever reason, things get in the way.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: When you go back sometimes it's not the same as it was and that's it and you move on
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: and it's gone forever and other times it's oh my god I can't believe
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: that I've forgotten this and there's a part of you that you've maybe closed off
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: or subconsciously decided to close off.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: How was that for you?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: No, it was instant, instantly back there.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't do it as well in the first few weeks, that's for sure.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I had to get fitter and get my head straight and all those things.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: I immediately loved it together.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was like coming home.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_02: So both in the environment and the physical nature of it and the adventure and
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: the friendships through the community, climbing community, which all just blossomed.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, we were part of a crowd.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: And just took off every other weekend down Taupo or somewhere else doing that.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: But climbing itself had changed dramatically in those years.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: So it's quite, well, it's interesting for me to look back on.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know whether it's for anyone else.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: But when I started climbing, I was very, you know, I was 16 or something.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a new sport.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a very fringe sport.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was a...
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: Somewhat radical.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, people who did it were different.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think they still are.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, and there were no women.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody's, you know, sister or something, very rarely a girlfriend.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, no, girlfriends got taken along, but they didn't climb much.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_02: They hang out, you know, and so on.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: Nowadays, I'm absolutely gobsmacked by the physical abilities and the climbing talent of women.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's extraordinary at every level,
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: not just in sport climbing, but Himalayan climbing, all of it.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's just transformed.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm really impressed.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a piece that you wished was physically permanent that you've done?
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because essentially all your work is designed to dissolve back into the environment
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: from which it came, right?
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, not all.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_02: Occasionally I either make something.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: Usually it started out people would say, oh I'd like...
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's a piece of your work,
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: but can you do something permanent on my land or on my something rather?
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I'd think about it.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I treat that as a sculptural design job.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_02: But they've all been works which are still about the same subject.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: They just end up in a different form.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: One of the most memorable ones was done for someone who's got a big property
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: in Queenstown Basin with lakes.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: You can see Coronet Peak from there and everything.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, they said, oh, we'd like a sculpture in or around the lake.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, if it's in the lake, so much the better.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: We could canoe past it or something.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: And a wonderful opportunity.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: Opportunity, so I designed this sculpture.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually made of big chain links.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's about five metres across or something.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's an arch of chain.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: Each one had to be welded to the next, as it were.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: So you kind of go, oh, how does that stand up?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: But the arch reflects in the water, so it becomes a completed circle.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: And that was about interdependence.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_02: So every link was dependent on the next one and the whole thing is dependent on everything else.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: So again, it's the same sort of stuff I'm thinking about and everything else.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_02: Everything is connected as opposed to the philosophy of separation,
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: which is what our culture actually operates on.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if the water level gets too high or too low, then you also lose the symmetry of forms.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: You would, you would, but
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_02: that's a managed lake.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's part of a landscape that has a level maintainer.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: But also an interdependence between water level and the aesthetic beauty of
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: the concept and consistency of form.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: For the pieces that do dissolve,
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: how emotional is that for you seeing something that you've spent so much time
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: and energy into creating then disappear?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: What emotions go through you when that happens?
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well each one is different of course and I'm not necessarily there.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_02: Things made of snow and so forth might well just walk away and leave it.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: Or anything that's clearly going to just blow away shortly.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even take it apart.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes I photograph them as they go through that process but not that much.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: I am interested in it,
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: but the thing is that I'm trying to photograph it at the time when it's at its peak,
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: when it's got its most correctness,
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose you might say, as a form or an artwork, as an idea.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_02: As they go through that process they're going towards entropy and chaos
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: and all those things which is how they should but they don't make a good photograph.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: And there are other things,
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: like sometimes people would interfere with work if they come by another day
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_02: or whatever.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's one up on Brest Hill,
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: way up there, that I made with Philippa when we were making a film.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, it was difficult to get the form right out of rocks and all this stuff.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: But eventually it looked about right, you know, spherical.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's beautiful.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know the piece I mean.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do you?
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: On top of the mountains.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, looking down on Lake Havir and stuff.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Someone interfered with that?
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, I don't call it.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: I shouldn't call it interfered, but they just, they added to it.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's interfering, Martin.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know,
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: but it's like a sculpture,
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: it's like a can, you know, people can't resist putting another stone on the can.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, and a friend of mine who was up there,
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_02: she photographed not just a sculpture, but...
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was on top of the sculpture, but the sculpture was completely different.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: It had all these other rocks on top and the bird.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, to my eye, it was all wrong, you know, sort of tilting over or something.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: But it was a nice thing to photograph and send to me.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the evolution of your work, right?
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_02: And people do like... Actually, a common thing is for people to destroy them.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_02: Especially younger males.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's a sandcastle concept, right?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, whatever it is,
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_02: you used to have kids down on Lake Taupo and they would throw stones at our work
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_02: and all that.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_02: It just got used to that and, yeah...
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Your fine line project, that ran for two decades?
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: More, I think.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was very, very difficult to accomplish.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: So 12 points around the globe?
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's right.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: What's your question?
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in terms of completing a project like that, I mean,
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: the magnitude and scope of a project like that that you're working on for so long,
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: such a big and important part of your life,
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: and then you finish it,
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: is it a tremendous sense of accomplishment, a huge anticlimax?
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: What's that like?
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: Both, actually.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: Because we never imagined it would take so long because life interferes.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_02: We weren't funded, we didn't
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_02: have the resources or film crews or anything to sort of add to it.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: I naively had thought that because the concept was so big and that What would you call it?
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_02: I just thought that over the years,
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_02: the idea of transforming
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_02: our systems operation on Earth was such a big idea
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_02: that many,
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: many organisations and so forth would rally around it and help make it much more of
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_02: a project that had more significance, more support and more output, if you like.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't the case at all.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: Even with the sorts of companies like Big Oil, I'm assuming?
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_02: Hell, I wouldn't have worked with Big Oil anyway.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Was there interest from those sorts of corporations?
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_02: No, there was very little interest at all.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_02: There was interest from people like Ray Anderson at Interface.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing is that...
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: In that world of art and making work and projects like that,
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: they didn't have an understanding of it.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't see where it fitted or what you could do with it.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't have a communications sort of approach to connecting with it.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: If you can finish something and offer it to someone like a corporate or
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: an industry management and say, look, I've got this.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_02: Can we use it for you or whatever?
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's one thing.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_02: But to say we've got this idea and we're going to go around the world
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_02: and take 10 years, 20 years or whatever it is to finish it.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, we want your support.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't go very far.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is that because it requires too much imagination on their part?
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, probably.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_02: Probably.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think so.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, frankly,
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_02: it takes a lot of imagination to even understand what the work is about
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_02: for most people.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I talked to Philippa about it and they said, well, don't worry about it.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_02: They just like it.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_02: They just think it's beautiful.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_02: I said, but have they got any of the ideas?
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_02: Do they understand any of the implications in this work about how we have to change?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: And most people don't.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_02: And even with everything that's going on in the news at the moment,
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_02: with the fires and the climate change problems and biodiversity loss and
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_02: the crossing seven out of nine planetary boundaries.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, most people, if you say, look, I'm sorry, do you understand we're in overshoot?
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_02: Say, no, what's overshoot?
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this is basically my problem.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to get all political, but is that
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_02: The lack of understanding astounds me.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: Globally or nationally?
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, globally.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah,
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_02: there are huge pockets and national entities that do get it and in some respects are
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_02: on a different track.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_02: But by God, it's taken a long time.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is that
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_02: With all the United Nations summits and all the NGO work
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_02: and everything else that's gone into trying to move the dial on emissions
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_02: and systems change and everything else,
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_02: the outcome is negligible.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_02: We haven't reduced emissions at all.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're still rising.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: We're not very good at connecting the dots, I think, a lot of the time.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of things and decisions that are made without really considering
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: the knock-on effects or the flow-on or downstream or whatever it is.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like decisions are made in isolation for a single thing.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_02: So going back to the fine line, it's like...
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it was called the fine line 25 years ago for a reason.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_02: Because we're treading a very fine line as a species.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: People don't get that.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're well over the fine line by now, aren't we?
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like, yeah.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, people don't want to talk about it.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that's another problem with the work is that You're working in an area that is not popular.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_02: No one wants to hear a bad story.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're pretty good at just focusing on,
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: whilst many of us in many aspects of life are not very good at focusing on the now,
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: that's one area that we're really good at.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_01: We're just like, oh, look,
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: just right now,
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just interested in having a ute,
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: so don't talk to me about ute tax,
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: you know, and the way those sorts of things are framed as well, politically.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: And around the, you know, the communication side of things, you know, looking at...
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: A term like climate change or greenwashing.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was considering that as well before thinking about the oil companies and stuff like that.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think greenwashing is...
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds kind of relatively neutral and kind as a term.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's not very judgy, is it?
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_01: And similar to climate change.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds relatively relaxed.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't mind it being a degree warmer when I'm on my summer holidays is generally
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_02: the attitude because they don't understand what one degree means on a global scale.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_01: Coming from Germany, I mean,
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: for a lot of people in Germany,
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: the upside is that we can now go to Scandinavia for our summer holidays.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because,
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: you didn't want to go there before in the summer holidays because
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: the weather might be a bit cold.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, you know, always a good opportunity.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit distressing.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're still building now in your 70s.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: How different...
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, say
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_02: that again.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still building.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you're still building now in your 70s.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_01: How does that feel now compared to earlier in your life?
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a different sense of urgency or are your frustrations level higher with people?
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have less patience when people don't understand what you're trying to say?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's very, very hard to...
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: Except that with all the information that's been imparted and the amount
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_02: of awareness that's been created around the ecological problems we have,
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_02: and all the others, inequity and so on, fascism, racism, whatever...
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's very,
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_02: very hard to accept that this hasn't been planned and kind of engineered
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_02: to get people to ignore it.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, there's every evidence of that.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_02: So,
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_02: you know, the oil companies who knew the science on climate change 40 years ago and hid it.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was exactly the same as the tobacco industry.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_02: You name it.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now the tech industry.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: AI, the dangers of AI and so on.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's not in their interest to do these things or to take them on board and act accordingly.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, we're on this growth, this trajectory of more, of everything.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what's been handed down to all of us, every one of us.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_02: You have to want more If you don't want more, well you
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: won't get anywhere.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_01: How can you change that?
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_01: One of the companies I had the most respect for that I worked with in Germany,
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: their strapline was Enkelfeig, which means suitable for our grandchildren.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that was their family business,
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_01: which has entirely, they're not bound to quarterly reporting and pure profit.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: Really exemplary in many of their business practices.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I find that an interesting concept,
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_01: that a lot of those companies Predominantly male CEOs of those big corporations are
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_01: of an age where they have grandchildren and to be able to reach them through,
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: do you really want your grandchild to look at you through the eyes of being
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_01: the person that basically destroyed it all?
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: How do you see in terms of, you know, how can we change things like that?
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I guess I've been looking at the how can we change things for a long time.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_02: I know, that's why I'm asking Martin.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't actually have the answer, I'm afraid.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to know that I could.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I still study this stuff and try to learn and think about it.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have the answers.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't found anyone else who's actually got the answer.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think there's any one answer.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a cultural shift.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_02: And the cultural shift,
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: these sort of, I don't know what you call them, like tipping points and things.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_02: All systems can happen like they do in natural systems.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_02: A natural system will go through changes of build up or become too much of this
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_02: or not enough of that or whatever.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it reaches a stage where it goes through several stages and then it reaches
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_02: a release stage in a natural system.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_02: All systems do this.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's all I can hope for is that there's enough information,
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: enough bad stuff,
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_02: enough bad information,
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_02: enough bad behavior and enough good behavior and good philosophies and good outcomes
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_02: that the thing swings the other way.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, what happened to the communist regime?
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_02: What happened to the Soviet Union?
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Overnight, you know, and so on.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_02: This is what could happen.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to believe right now.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: But I think we are going through a global phase shift
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: that... Well,
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: it could have any kind of outcome,
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_02: but one of them could be a phase shift in the kind of sensible,
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_02: intelligent, evolutionary direction that I would hope for.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's cool that you've still got that much optimism, I've got to say.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_01: LAUGHTER
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_01: I've been working so hard for so long with that message.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can't be other than optimistic.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think in terms of so many decisions,
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_01: so many big important decisions are made predominantly with a really high degree
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_01: of self-interest.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_01: So whether that's self-interest for the corporation or self-interest.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: There needs to be some sort of upside.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at things like plastic bags in supermarkets,
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: you can save money,
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_01: dear supermarkets,
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: you can save money by not having to have these plastic bags that you're giving us
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: for free.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can make higher margin on more sustainable,
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_01: more longer lasting bags by selling those to the punters.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's self-interest and then suddenly that change happened pretty quickly but
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_01: that was education and also based on self-interest.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't predominantly because this is good for the environment or good for a community.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_02: No, that's right.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_02: So there are huge areas of positivity to look at to say well everything's not bad.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean three
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_02: years back we got Invited to be in a program the BBC created called Nature and Us.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that was an arts program with an arts historian front person and a 13-part series.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And they said, well, we like your work.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, it seems to be a sort of anchor point almost for the subject we're dealing with.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Can you do, you know, and this was during COVID.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_02: And they said, well, we can't fly a crew over to do that from London, England.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know any filmmakers?
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, you know the community here.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_02: One or two?
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: And also,
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_02: I have a habit of when I get an opportunity like that,
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_02: I have an idea within a day,
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_02: probably half a day, and I'm working out how to make it and so on.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_02: So...
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_02: I called up a filmmaker and said, would you like to do this?
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I also knew where we'd make it because we'd been up on the mountains doing
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_02: in this location before.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_02: And we knew we had to do it in two days or something, this whole thing.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Excuse me.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, the BBC,
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_02: they sent over a script,
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_02: not a script, you know, their questions, much like you've got your questions.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_02: They did the same sort of thing,
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_02: and the filmmakers did that as an interview to what are you making here,
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_02: why, and all the rest of it.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_02: But what we made was up on Albert Byrne's saddle near Mount Aspiring.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_02: There's a beautiful chalet which is owned by the Myers family
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_02: who run Forakia Lodge here in Wanaka.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a long story but we'd worked up there for 22 days in the past
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_02: on another project where they had us,
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_02: you know, invited us to stay and make work up there.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_02: So we knew the location,
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_02: we knew the materials, we knew the light, we knew how it would all work.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_02: All we had to do was get there in half decent conditions and make the thing.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we did that.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a really lovely thing to do and be part of that film
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_02: because they were tracking artists from,
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know,
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_02: 50 years or so in their relationship with nature and making work on what it was
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_02: about and why art was
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_02: integral to
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_02: tackling this subject because so often it isn't,
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_02: it's all the science,
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_02: we get all the science and Most people don't sort of relate to that terribly well.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And scientists are very poor communicators.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_02: And also scientists aren't supposed to have opinions.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_02: They're supposed to produce facts.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, they say, oh, we've got this degree of climate change in front of us.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the temperatures are going to be X number of degrees globally above...
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_02: Historical numbers.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_02: They don't say, oh, that's terribly bad.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_02: And what it actually means is you're all going to die or your children are going
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_02: to die or we're all going to starve or there's going to be fires.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And they don't tend to focus on that.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_02: They focus on, you know, what they think they know.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's data, right?
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Data.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_02: And anyway, but artists can do what they like.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what we did.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we did.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we made a work.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the work was actually like a circle of snow against the mountain,
• 1:16:02
  SPEAKER_02: dark rock mountain background on the other side of the valley.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_02: And through the middle of it,
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_02: going from left to right,
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_02: because it's like a, it's not a full circle, it's a, what do you call it?
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like an O.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a dark, you know, it looks as though the top is separated from the bottom.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_02: And you go, hang on.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_02: How come that's not fallen down?
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the middle is missing, nothing holding it up.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And the concept was end of the line, question mark.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like, are we going to end linear processes or are we going to end everything?
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_02: As in end of the line.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I knew we could achieve it by,
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_02: because I knew the background and the foreground,
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_02: the snow was white and the background would be dark because of the mountain
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_02: behind it.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_02: What we had to do was to put something in the sculpture that looked as
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_02: though there was nothing there, but of course there was.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_02: So we buried rocks in the snow that registered as the background.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Do you understand?
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you looked at this thing, you go, oh, there's nothing holding it up.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And explain that to the filmmakers.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think you had a long period where you thought you were sort
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: of alone doing this sort of work, right?
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then you came across other land artists and people doing things.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: What was that like?
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Was that suddenly offensive?
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh great, we're a community and there's more of us.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Was that different?
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: How did that make you feel?
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well there were people doing what was known as land art way before I did and even
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_02: the kind of work I make like ephemeral works
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_02: before I did, long before I did.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Back in the 60s the land artists were making huge works in the deserts and
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Big outdoor landscapes in America and so on.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_02: But basically it was a transition moving out of galleries,
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_02: out of museums into the natural world.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I recognised all that.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean even Christo, all that wrapping and big, big projects.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And Andy Goldsworthy,
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_02: small ephemeral works, some of them, well all the early stuff was like that.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_02: So, no, I wasn't, that was, yeah, I joined their community, really.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a guy called Richard Long from the UK,
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_02: who, I think he represented Britain in the Biennale in the 60s or something.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_02: And he used to go on walks and map the walks or onto maps and so on and make works,
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_02: ephemeral works or whatever on these walks.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: So he had a whole different outdoor kind of way of operating and documenting
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_02: to make his projects.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I really admired his work.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_02: He used to make works from mud in the River Avon and stuff.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_02: So he'd make these big, very minimal works in galleries, very large works, using clay from...
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_02: The river or something with handprints and all that kind of
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_01: stuff.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was it a supportive community or was it a supportive community, embracing, competitive?
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: How do you address one another?
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't see it.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_02: Frankly, I haven't met it as a community.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Not that I'm against it at all.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_02: I just think we're very sparsely spread.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you won't see another dozen people Ecological artists.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's no class reunion every five years.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't even think there's a dozen in New Zealand,
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_02: never mind in Wanaka or anywhere like that.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, not that I know of.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_02: I could be completely wrong.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And there is an understanding of it and people often take school children out
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_02: and make these sorts of things and follow suit.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a well-known thing that it's good to be out in nature and it's good to interact
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_02: with nature.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's well understood.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_02: I don't see very much of it, really, in the ecological art world.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_02: If I scoured the internet, I'd find lots of it, I'm sure.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_02: All kinds of nouns.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you see your work evolving now in this next phase of your life
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_01: where there will be physical limitations in terms of things like the alpine axis and
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_01: the really hardcore physical nature of your work?
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is that then going to evolve into different forms or different processes
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: or become more directorial?
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_01: How do you see this evolving?
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_02: Good question.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, one thing's already happened,
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_02: which in some ways surprises me,
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_02: because I've always liked trying to make well-produced photographs
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_02: and all those things with good cameras and not a lot of equipment,
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_02: but good equipment, and to be able to make large prints and all those things.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_02: And more recently, because of the Evolution of cell phones, and I've always got one with me.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_02: I started using it just as a documentation thing.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I recognized how good they are.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, well, I don't need to make this into a, you know, a mural.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've just got an idea.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'll shoot it on the cell phone.
• 1:21:29
  SPEAKER_02: I did one quite recently where we kayaked on the lake,
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_02: kayaked across to the peninsula and camped the night,
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_02: and then found on the beach in the shingle and everything,
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_02: a stone miraculously that was like a human torso.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_02: It didn't have a head, it had a body, and it had two perfect legs.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going, wow.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_01: A stone?
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just a little stone.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we've got this whole body of work we call guardians,
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_02: which is another figurative form that appears in their work.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I thought, well, I'll make something with that.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_02: All I need to find is a head.
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_02: But would it balance?
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, it was tricky to balance.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_02: But eventually I got it to balance in a nice spot and did this whole kind of scene
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_02: with this tiny, it's only an inch and a half high or something, on the cell phone.
• 1:22:21
  SPEAKER_02: But it was a broad picture and a glorious night on the lake.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm thinking, well...
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_02: That sort of says something.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_02: You don't need a lot of stuff.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's another example of less is more.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very analog downsizing.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the show's called The Unmaking which is partly referring to the moment
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_01: where someone has to stop what they're doing or something that is actually working
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: but they understand that they need to stop and move on to something else.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_01: When I look at your body of work it feels like almost many of
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_01: the things are intrinsically designed to be unmade By nature,
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: or made back into nature or the organic form that they were in.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: What does that say about you as a designer and an artist,
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of having that as your mise en terre, your core approach?
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_02: That process,
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_02: if you like,
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_02: of things becoming or being unmade or at the end of it all is my whole philosophy.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't have an issue with death.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_02: We all die.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_02: We're all going to be unmade.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_02: And everything is unmade, even great people and their reputations, you name it.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's something worth contemplating that nothing is too special to be unmade.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_02: We can hang on to things too long or kind of say, well,
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_02: this is precious to me, but is it as precious as it needs to be in the long run?
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_02: Are there other things more precious?
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the stage that in many ways our whole culture is at.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_02: We treat too much as precious that isn't.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, our homes, our cars, our reputations, our stature.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_02: And we would do well to value a lot of other things that...
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'm more precious but don't get treated as such.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like community, like family.
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_02: I can't say I'm good at it.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_02: But I know that it's true.
• 1:25:05
  SPEAKER_02: And...
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm currently going through a whole tedious process of archiving things.
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a hopeless filer.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_02: Philippa is a brilliant filer and she'll do it for me if she can get her hands on it and do it.
• 1:25:26
  SPEAKER_02: But she doesn't know my library and she can't find anything.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_02: She's done it with the old slides.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_02: She can do that anyway.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to do it digitally.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_02: I've moved from one old program to Lightroom and my computer broke down and all this stuff.
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_02: But I sort of think...
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And Philip's going, why do you need to do this?
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm going, well,
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_02: I spent 30 years creating,
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_02: you know, we've spent 30 years creating it and you're part of it.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_02: You've done a lot of it as well.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're responsible.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_02: We've got to do, you've got to leave something.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I suppose it's a legacy or whatever.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what I'm kind of going through.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_01: What form's that going to take?
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know yet?
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm just organising as best I can in my muddled way.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_02: There's a small version, it's not an archive at all, but we're very pleased about it.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_02: We got invited to have some of our projects on a thing called Photoanthology,
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_02: which is what they're calling the Encyclopedia of Photography.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_02: The of photography's history and art and it's it's not done by image it's done
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_02: by projects so so they only map projects once or another and we got two books
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_02: and two or three projects in there I think and what's good about it is that it
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's connecting people within genres or styles of work or philosophies or whatever.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_02: So you
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_02: go to one area of work and then it connects you up through the web base
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_02: and database of this encyclopedia to go and connect up with all these other artists
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_02: and see their work.
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's extensive.
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's just going to go on growing.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Hopefully.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_02: So pleased to be part of it.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: What would you want someone in the middle of their own version of that?
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Mid-career,
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: mid-compromise,
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_01: perhaps shilling their talents for a corporate dollar
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_01: or not quite sure what they're prepared to or able to let go of to take
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_01: from your life and those decisions that you've made along the way,
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_01: the doors that you've walked through?
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, everybody's different and everyone's got different ambitions and visions or passions.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_02: It could be anything.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the important thing is that it's yours,
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_02: that you're true to yourself and that you try and maximize
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_02: in a true and kind of...
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Less harmful way.
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Things that are not only valuable to you but might be valuable to others.