this is a very cherished recipe for my family. growing up, we would stay with the vishwanathans in canberra on our annual trips home to see our grandparents. the house was filled to the brim with books, art, and beautiful dark wooden furniture including an indoor swing which was endless fun for my sister and me.

mornings were spent around the kitchen bench, waiting for durga’s coriander parathas, served with chutney and black coffee (for the parents). afterwards, a bush walk up red hill with vish and their trusty boxers - jomo then sultan - spotting kangaroos if we were lucky. they were very magical visits.

this christmas, we found each other on the other side of the world in berkeley, staying with their son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren - kedar, kylie, victor, and olivia. i drove up from los angeles, durga and vish flew in from canberra. the famous parathas hadn’t been made in a while, so it took some convincing to get the master back in action. i made sure to document the method.

so if you’re reading along, count yourself lucky. please make and enjoy.

thank you durga. it was such a pleasure to learn from you.

Leave a comment

to understand where i got off track, i’m going back to the beginning - remembering the highs, the points of intrigue, the through-lines. there’s something really sacred to be found in our first loves and passions, the things we were excited by before we were clouded with expectations and outside opinions.

i want to say this was when i discovered photography,

but really it was with this camera - the fujifilm nexia q1 with its periwinkle purple case. i adored it.

it was a film point and shoot camera, and the greatest accessory, worn around my neck with great pride. it took soft, saturated pictures. it had a groovy form fitting case which made me feel like a true professional. i took it on the go, on our family travels but i honestly don’t have any memories of being concerned with the outcome. i loved the process and claiming a photographer’s identity.

i properly learned film as a teen on my dad’s nikon f90. when he got the nikon d90 (digital 90), i started to pay more attention, learning all the many settings the dslr had to offer.

but if i’m being honest i was never much of a technical photographer. it was always more about the sentimentality. i’m fascinated by the preciousness and randomness of a photograph. and still to this day my dad’s f90 is my go to camera. its heavy as hell but i haven’t really been bothered to learn to trust anything else.

around those teen years, i had this one roll of film which when i finally got it developed, totally rocked my world. it came from a plastic lomography camera, the ultimate grungy, grainy, heavily-vignetted camera on the market (urban outfitters) circa 2010. i loved quiet landscape photography so i had it set on the panorama mode. around that time as a family we moved from los angeles to toronto, spent time home in australia and with family in malaysia. geographically and emotionally, i was all over the place.

in all the moves this camera kept getting lost. when it would resurface i’d take a snap. because there were months and miles between each photograph, every other exposure or so, i’d forget to wind to the next. so by the time i had this roll developed, it was this incredible, continuous overlapping snapshot of my teenage angsty life in motion. on panorama mode and with some double exposures it was not a clean role of 36 shots. a bedroom window in canada bled into a farewell in malibu bled into an intimate family scene in malaysia and so on. it summarized my life so perfectly. the limitations of film were exactly what allowed this.

as an extremely nostalgic person, the next decade of my photography years was very much informed by this roll. i shot mostly on the f90, and mostly recording quiet moments - architecture, landscapes, mementos, and the occasional portrait of family and special people i couldn’t often see.

by the time i was studying photo media at art school, i had an iphone and so did the rest of the world. ironically, in that whole degree i don’t recall taking a single finished digital photo or using the lighting studio more than once. i was making video collages with public and personal archival footage. i used a digital camera at one point to make 1:1 recreations of sentimental familial objects and furniture.

but recreationally, and with social media’s ominous and steady influx, snapping a quick shot on the iphone became exponentially more regular. there was this small golden window before the cloud where the images felt more precious because if you lost the phone, you lost the photos. its so wildly different to today’s reality. i take a photo without even thinking, it gets sucked into the cloud, lost in my tens or hundreds of thousands of photos, and quite likely might never be seen again.

so why bring my 2lb nikon f90 on a trip when my iphone weighs a few ounces? when you’re australian living a 12+ hour flight away from almost everywhere in the world, space is limited, comfort is necessary, convenience is key. sadly the f90 started collecting dust at home.

my photography has always been an important starting place for other artwork, like drawing, painting, and collaging. with the preciousness gone from the nature of my iphone photos, these could no longer- or only barely be used as source material for artwork. who was i without source material? without actively adding to my archive? not to be totally dramatic, but that’s probably around the time i had my quarter life crisis.

with any good breakdown comes a great deal of discovery. something was not working and the spark was dimming dangerously low. so i turned back to what worked in the past.

• something light-weight

• something that doesn’t have the wormhole of the internet on it

• anything that counters the flatness of an iphone image

i considered a film point and shoot. a few friends had started to use them. but again, i couldn’t land on a model and i didn’t want to branch out too far. i find i am more inspired with parameters.

so last year when i was back home visiting my parents, my dad pulled out his treasured box of old family technology - a lime green ipod, walkman, handheld video camera, my beloved fujifilm nexia, and much to my excitement, a couple mini canon ixus cameras. one digital and one film. unfortunately once back in los angeles, with new batteries and film, i found both were sadly out of working order.

determined to keep my output within the family tradition, i went on ebay and i bought the next closest model to my mum’s pocket-sized digital canon ixus she had used during my childhood.

with the first shot, my spark was back.

it’s first proper outing was at hard summer music festival. getting some quick snaps of friends and favourite artists, all the while having my phone locked away did wonders for the mental health.

even though it is digital, the ritual of plugging the sd card into a card reader into my laptop and not knowing what to expect because the camera screen is so small - still gives me exactly what i was missing. unexpectedness, preciousness, roughness.

its also been a great tool to capture timestamps and workings in my studio. there’s enough immediacy to check it out later when i’m home, but not too much where i accidentally get sucked into the internet or a text conversation when simply trying to document a process.

getting use out the f90 hasn’t come as easily but i am trying. i managed to take only six photographs with it after lugging it all the way to kenya last summer. it was on my last day of a month long trip staying with a family in a rural farm off the coast of mombassa. i ran down to the mangroves and got some photos of the farm’s only baobab tree. it felt somewhat obligatory.

but the soft, fuzzy, impromptu photos on my digi cam from this trip really sung to me. i had it with me all the time. most days it was the only thing on me, just slung around my wrist - no phone, wallet, bag needed. it was small enough too that if coming across other people, it didn’t feel invasive. hypocritical i know - but i’m so embarrassed by touristic photography and conscious to avoid it where possible while continuing on my nostalgic image/memory making quest to capture special times, places, and people.

most importantly, i’ve found my way back to this medium which feels, at this point, part of my artistic dna. with the returned capturing, i’m reading, writing, and theorizing. i have new source material for artwork and used some of the images from the trip to kenya for my first new artworks in a while.

it was a good lesson and discovery in grounding, coming back to roots, and that pure sense of childhood intrigue. really there’s no reason not to be living in that state now.

here’s to this ongoing love.

Leave a comment

the start can also feel daunting. maybe you’ve got the classic staring at a blank page block or there’s external pressure, a tight budget, or it marks a certain step up in your career.

with age and experience this has finally skewed more to a pragmatic optimism rather than overwhelm. it helps when opportunities feel less finite, or when you learn how to create them for yourself.

i’ve also learnt to sit with what i’m now realizing are somewhat unanswerable questions - what’s the best way to start? should i re-invent the wheel? do i need a new system?!

when i’m at this starting block, whether it’s for a new brief, a pitch, an ideation stage for a personal project - these are some of my guiding and grounding principles:

• start expansive. remove biases, limitations, pre-judgments or expectations. even budget - don’t worry about that yet.

• don’t look horizontally. of course keep up to date with what’s current, but beginning a new music video is not the time or place to be referencing recently made music videos. we don’t want to be regurgitating culture.

• seek unexpected references. what can be found flipping to a random page of a magazine? how could a street sign you’re looking at while stuck in traffic become the seedling of a new idea? how might the setting of the historical fiction novel you’re reading be translated into a concept or a set build?

• return to the classics. maybe you’re making an ad. but what can you garner from your favourite film or art theory book?

• uncover meaningfulness in the message. find points of humanity and connection. what’s the emotional story? what is something oddly specific that’s actually highly relatable.

• switch mediums. consider how the concepts could live across different forms. refine and define later.

• steer toward the direction you want to work within. have you had an odd fascination recently? is there a designer you’ve been obsessing over for years? use this as a chance to explore interests and build from that.

• set parameters, then dive deep (an exercise). if a visual world needs to feel of a certain era, limit research to that era. reference books or typefaces from that time. or: how many ideas can be generated in x minutes? or: what can be made on a single piece of paper? close the laptop.

• be absolutely wary of the algorithm. are.na, pinterest, and IG are useful but they can seriously rob you of uniqueness and spontaneity. they’re built to feed you more of what you’re already looking at and recirculate the same images.

• seek answers from within. this should go without saying but do not start with google, don’t ask ai or ask a friend before you’ve used your own brain.

• trust your instinct. ultimately a unique POV provides a better edge than any other tool. bring your individuality, history, heritage, and personality into it.

none of this is to discount how important and energizing collaboration is or being tuned into reception, context, and audience. but before those stages, ground yourself first.

and don’t forget to walk the ideas out with a good playlist.

best of luck to you!

Leave a comment

and by some time i mean -

i’ve got rubble accumulating

but how cute, all the things clinging onto the wall for dear life waiting patiently for my return

i checked out this tillmans book from my studio library to join my at home library for a while and i’m very excited to revisit it after having just seen his incredible and huge exhibition at the pompidou last summer

i had the pleasure of seeing the show with my family and one of my dearest friends babette who is also an artist and painted the drop sheet in that first photo

in my studio visit tonight i also urgently took down some prints of my ex (simply not the energy i’m welcoming anymore) and replaced them with paul pfeifer, chiura obata, and picasso postcards

a strong upgrade

(for now)

from what i remember it was a pretty understated group portrait scene, no branding or logos, not obviously art and no sign posts to it being a special project

it felt like it’d been there forever. i liked that it was a nice image in an advertising space but it wasn’t asking anything of me. it also wasn’t a mural with tags and IG handles

here’s an even more ambiguous one i came across in los feliz years ago:

i’m sure i would’ve seen women in the city in 2008, i wish i could remember! there were works by jenny holzer, barbara kruger, louise lawler, and cindy sherman all over the city in unexpected spaces like billboards, theatres, bus shelters, like this one -

i’m discovering now you can seek out current art billboard projects in LA like at the billboard creative or the UNDEFEATED billboard project on la brea. maybe that’s what i’d been seeing on my way to work years ago?

but what i really love is the idea of these encounters happening unexpectedly, with no information provided and avoiding the natural pull to place what i’m seeing into an art-world context.

these minimal context, natural sky-scape billboards are so dreamy to me. less art, more backdrop.

this is a lead in for a new art work reveal! i’ve found my way back to non-art material printing, looking at images less for subject and more for surface. blowing them up, degrading the quality, losing information.

stay tuned friends & fam.

Leave a comment

it’s mostly photographers sharing prints so I wanted to turn to photography too

it’s a very open brief, a loose concept around movement

no time to frame and I don’t like unframed prints tacked to walls, so the photo needs to be on some other material. i’ve printed on fabric, pasted on wood, and also experimented with vinyl prints on sheet metal

Of all the metals I like brass for its warmth. Steel and silver can feel sterile in a white gallery. Brass carries age and markings well, in a similar way bronze and copper can like these works below. But there’s something familial about brass which I still gravitate towards.

These are some experiments with brass and photography from a while back. Film photos with brass frames and vinyl prints adhered to brass.

to be continued

considering movement tomorrow/ soon :)

Leave a comment

I was remembering how she described her process before I could picture a work. I chased up this art forum article and this piece on eflux and jotted down some things that stuck with me -

on how paintings don’t function the same as photographs, even if closely copied

I choose an image because it attracts you to a painting. But a painting isn’t a window. A painting has its own reality.

time which separates the mediums

My tools are like hours, and it becomes a real part of the work. Whereas in photography, it’s instantaneous, and then you pick which image.

the process is the primary point and the works are a record of the process

This work is a record of examined + intense looking, something internal from me to it, and something said back to me. A relationship, an opening of some innocence and a disappearance of time in its making. In the work I like best, these qualities remain.

I was then reminded of this exercise I’d do in my sketchbook, a sketch from life. then a sketch of that sketch, and a sketch of that one and so forth. I was interested in the ‘slippage’ between the two, like the author writes

For Celmins, copies are never perfect, just as repetition never yields precisely the same results. The slippage, however minor, between two nearly identical images is the space the artist has explored her entire career, and undoubtedly accounts, at least in part, for her interest in working with the same image more than once, in repeatedly starting over.

note to self to come back to idea of copying as being (optimistically) generative & something about the artist as the machine

that is all for today folks

Leave a comment

check out constructed landscape

see if you can find the millipede

send me back a screenshot of your landscapes

here’s one of mine

goodnight everyone. enjoy. see you back here soon

Leave a comment

a slippery slope, I love a nostalgia trip

they were perhaps not as deep as I was hoping to discover, but I kind of loved it. the reference images hold up. list of reading (bit dated) but great. quick mention of the diaspora – also great.

I guess it comes down to the comfort and reassurance of seeing taste holding up throughout the years. of course we want some taste to change and definitely deepen and develop. but as an artist or creative, putting things out there in the world can be weird. the permanence, visibility, and impact can be daunting and that can create a lot of second guessing. so in a way, this is like a bit of evidence.

and here is my testament: past me backs future me

even if the taste is a little whack looking back, at least something was made

in honour of 2017 me, what I’m sharing with you today is susan sontag’s in plato’s cave, an essay that makes me very happy and I must remember to reread from time to time. I find it fascinating that it continues to feel so revelatory

I’m also sharing freetown sound, which was frequently on loop during that era

just as I was getting quite deep in my favourite rabbit hole of personal internet archives I found this at the end of an essay

I’m not sure what I was getting at with this mic drop moment but I will take that as a sign from past me to sign off for the night

thank you to my readers for tuning in

see you soon

Leave a comment

with minutes left in the day, a slightly optimistic goal of bed by midnight, and a promise to keep this newsletter brief and current - here’s a quick snapshot of what’s to come:

• frequent newsletters - daily? weekdays? let’s say often for now

• text + some other medium shared

• something thoughtful, creative, ideally something i’ve made and also things i’ve consumed or considered

• maybe with a through-line, maybe not

to begin

a pensive last work made in the studio that i will be happy to see back in there soon (i promise)

a lovely song about little things

a powerful book about how the small things are the mightiest things

thank you to my reader(s) for accepting the scrappiness and supporting me with my need for consistency over perfection

see you soon/ tomorrow

Leave a comment