“Practice any art... to make your soul grow.”
Answered for Sam Pattinson
School of Art, RMIT University
Thursday 27th August, 2026
After graduating from art school, how did you get started in your early career/practice?
True to the expression that in the end is the beginning, upon finishing art school we embarked on our first series of artists’ books, made in collaboration with one another, and with little understanding of what an artists’ book really was. We’d both loved working with books, in the sense of journals, zines, and the intimate/hard to display, but we didn’t really have a refined goal. Or, at least, looking back to the late ’90s, that’s how it feels. We liked the portability of the artists’ book, and the self-publish ethos of zines, and so our first series of six artists’ books centred around a loose theme of recording pockets of time.
We were successful in receiving an Australian Council Grant (New Work, Emerging Artist, in 2000), which enabled us to realise the project, and which also undoes the looseness of our earlier words. So, it seems, we did have a plan, after all, we just allowed wriggle room for the things you learn through research and doing along the way. This series of artists’ books was created with the idea of sharing in mind. Logistically, this was not really possible as they were a limited edition (of 10), but the thinking behind it is not so different to our work now: we are interested in the conversation and openness, and layering of information.
How did you find being collaborating artists affects your practice?
It gives us both the confidence to try something new or challenging, as we can be a safety net for each other. This also keeps us motivated, so in the natural ebbs, we can take turns in lifting each other.
Our collaboration, as you know, is one based on harmony as opposed to opposites or distinct roles, and this gives each of us space to experiment with all sorts of different ideas. It’s a pattern that really suits us both, and so, even when we are not collaborating, we collaborate unofficially and help each other out. In short, it is a joy to share the load, working collaboratively. If there is one downside, perhaps it is that we are often paid as one artist (for talks or workshops).
What challenges arise from balancing your practice with other work and responsibilities?
It is a constant juggle, a furious shuffle, a world of one thing receiving less for the sake of the other, but once you let go of the need for all things to look and be a certain way at all times, it eventually, hopefully smooths its way out. And in the trying to find the balance, another benefit of collaborating. If we are both working on the one project, it is a fun, if hairy ride, and the other person isn’t left with all the boring bits.
It also tends to be that all those wonderful opportunities or exciting, random projects will always fall one atop the other. Never staggered, but nearly always all at once. So sometimes the work takes priority and all the other day-to-day tasks pile up. In saying that, though, sometimes the break from an artwork is also good as it simmers away there while you are doing other things, and that can bring about the unexpected or an answer.
Have you continued to develop your technical skills beyond art school?
We try to see each new body of work or project as a chance to learn a new skill or to make something different or to work with a different or new material. In part to ensure we are engaged and not restless, and also because you don’t want people to be like, ‘huh, I’ve seen that from them before’.
Sometimes, we also get to work with master printmakers, like Martin King at the Australian Print Workshop, on a three-colour lithograph or a à la poupée hard-ground etching. So, while this is not a new technical skill we are developing, we are considering how we will highlight these techniques in our work. Which parts of the image could be hand-coloured, which parts need space to breathe, which parts will be lightly furred and which parts sketchy lines.
Incorporating more of the written word, too, is another way we are always trying to develop and grow. Another means to open a window for the viewer or reader.
Have you made any mistakes that you have learnt from?
So many, and all. Collage and collaboration seem a good way to implement this, for there is little that you cannot paste over with a patch or come up with a workaround. Perhaps you will ‘stick a fish on it’, that section where the book cloth doesn’t neatly align by a whisker. Perhaps the book will be a couple of pages more, so you need to manually add the additions by hand. Perhaps you will perforate this or that.
No matter the project, big or small, everything is important, and this we learnt through trial and error.
What advice would you give to newly graduating artists looking to get into the art world?
Find and polish or whittle your own unique voice. Stick at it, and then some more, year after year. Don’t be afraid to grow it into something else, if that suits, too. Stick to your own moral principles. And always submit your bio/artists statement on time.
We also particularly like Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to a group of high school students: “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s Inside you, to make your soul grow.”
To make your soul grow: what an aim!
Has your practice gone the direction you thought it would at university?
Yes, in the sense that we are still making our work and still doing our thing, and still forging our own path, but in another sense, it also looks wildly different to what we’d thought. At art school, we presumed that by now things would feel more stable, not less. That things would feel more fixed, and less held together by twine, but this is not the case. The footing is as wobbly as ever. Things feel just as uncertain as ever, which is a reflection of the world around us, really.
As artists with a commercial aspect to your practice, what you have learnt in selling your work?
We love making zines and artists’ books to sell at Sticky Institute’s Festival of the Photocopier or at the NGV’s Melbourne Art Book Fair. They are both a great deadline to work towards, and a wonderful chance to meet the people who also like similar things to you.
We have always tried to keep our work affordable, so we will have a zine for $3 ranging to an artists’ book, like the recent tunnel book, How will they know there’s no-one left, for $1300, by way of a tale about insects for $80. Ultimately, we’d like our work to find an audience, a reader, a home, and this loops us back to our very first artists’ book series. We make work to share and talk with and to others.
And that’s it, in a nutshell. Hope this helps.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Cheers,
G&L
Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Restoring corridors, taken up again, 2025, artists’ book, photographed by Tim Gresham
