Tamara Baillie on how to keep breathing

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Tamara Baillie’s practice is located at the convergence of identity and memory.

Tamara Baillie. Photo: Sia Duff. Courtesy the artist.

Her work plays with concepts of presence and absence, to explore and question accepted historical narratives. Emerging from explorations of her own elusive familial and cultural histories, her practice often considers strategies for masking, concealment and control. In 2019, Baillie was a studio resident at ACE Open, Adelaide, and in 2018 was awarded a Helpmann Academy residency at the British School in Rome.

Her exhibition, Ribwreck, is currently on view at Firstdraft until 29 October 2020.

Firstdraft: Your work contends with both ‘presence and absence’ – a tension that is both physically and conceptually embodied by a skeleton. How did you settle on the form of the ribcage?

Tamara Baillie: My dad was a boat maker and my earliest making was in his workshop where there were always multiple boats in the process of being built or repaired. When you make a boat you start with the ribs, it’s essentially the same form as a shipwreck. Much later in medical school I had a chance to study and observe the human ribcage and became more conscious of the obvious physical and etymological parallels. I was always going to make a ‘ribwreck’, it was more a process of figuring out why.  

Much of my recent work has been about breath and breathing, the defining action between life and death. In the last few years I feel increasingly pessimistic about our future as a nation and a planet. Boats are heavily symbolic for many people and I think in Australia, an island, there are many deeper resonances for our nation, our peoples and our histories. In 2020, the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing at Kamay/Botany Bay there is an extra impetus to reflect on the past and consider the possible futures now open to us at this juncture. How will we move beyond our intertwined legacies of neoliberalism, settler colonialism and environmental degradation?  Is it already too late to save what remains?

Tamara Baillie, Ashes To Ashes, 2015, muslin, sugar, zippers, lace. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Lara Merrington.

Tamara Baillie, Ribwreck, 2020, HCFC free polystyrene, sequins, fishing sinkers, sound 250 × 400 × 100 cm (approx.), installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

FD: Your work often features web-like lace and gauze forms hardened by sugar. There’s a fixedness to these works, and simultaneously a fragility, ever threatening to crack even as they spread across the gallery. In Ribwreck, sequins have supplanted sugar, and fragility is embodied by form – you feel ribs cracked and fractured. Can you talk a bit about this tension in your work – rigidity and frailty, hard and soft, solid and liquid etc. ?

TB: I’ve always been interested in geography – the study of people and places – and as an artist I’ve become very interested in psycho-geography, which extends to the psychological and emotional aspects of place, including their histories. It seems to me that nothing is ever permanent and also that there are repeated patterns: everything is constantly changing and nothing ever changes.

I have used sugar and cotton for their complex histories as much as their formal qualities: their extensive role in colonisation, slavery and environmental degradation; their highly refined whiteness; their paradoxical associations with both healing and softness (bandages, sweets) and destruction and decay (shrouds and cavities). I actually started to make this work in my usual sugar process and it was all wrong. It was maybe too ghost-like for this particular work.

“... in medical school I had a chance to study and observe the human ribcage and became more conscious of the obvious physical and etymological parallels. I was always going to make a ‘ribwreck’, it was more a process of figuring out why. ”

Tamara Baillie, Memory Blocks: Last Drinks, 2013, cotton, sugar, plaster Courtesy the artist.

“How will we move beyond our intertwined legacies of neoliberalism, settler colonialism and environmental degradation?  Is it already too late to save what remains?”

FD: To quote Jasmin Stephens in her catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, “Baillie’s inclination in all this is to question how any act or object of memorial can adequately account for the past”. She speaks of visible and invisible forms of knowledge and continuity that transcend physical monumentation – of ritual and kin relations. Do these forms and ideas inform your practice, and if so how?

TB: For me personally, boats are also a potent totem of my dad, a boat maker. It was the 20th anniversary of his death the week prior to this exhibition opening so the process of making this work was also an act of memorialisation, a ritual to remember and mourn. The process was as important to me as the final work.

Tamara Baillie, Dust To Dust, 2015, doilies, bones Courtesy the artist. Photo: Lara Merrington.

FD: The ribs very subtly and poetically trace the form and shape of a subtly audible soundtrack – can you talk about the element of sound in this exhibition?

TB: This was a way to keep the work breathing, to keep it alive and to more directly acknowledge the making process. This could have been an even darker work and it was important to me to actively try to maintain at least a tiny element of hope – if there’s still breath, maybe there’s still hope.

Tamara Baillie, Ribwreck, 2020, HCFC free polystyrene, sequins, fishing sinkers, sound 250 × 400 × 100 cm (approx.), installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

I recorded my breathing many times in the final weeks of making, a record of the mental, emotional, physical exhaustion I was feeling. Like many people, exhaustion has been a frequent feeling this year. I wanted to capture that bodily experience of feeling pushed to your limits, not knowing if you’re able to get up again.

Tamara Baillie, Ocean Ghosts, 2006, cotton, sugar, steel. Courtesy the artist.

“I aim to make work that is relevant and accessible to all Australians and my very large, very working class family scattered across rural Australia”

Tamara Baillie, Dust To Dust, 2015, doilies, bones Courtesy the artist. Photo: Lara Merrington.

“This was a way to keep the work breathing”

Tamara Baillie, Ribwreck, 2020, HCFC free polystyrene, sequins, fishing sinkers, sound 250 × 400 × 100 cm (approx.), installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

“For me art is a way of being alive: a way to be a human being and a way to connect with others.”

Tamara Baillie, Ribwreck, 2020, HCFC free polystyrene, sequins, fishing sinkers, sound 250 × 400 × 100 cm (approx.), installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

FD: Who or what are you listening to, watching, reading? How do you stay connected – or how do you disconnect – in these times?

TB: In many ways I’ve been lucky that my life is not that different – I’m still able to go my studio, I still have a day job to support my practice, and I’m super grateful to have regular studio buddies who’re around for socially distanced chats and bickies.

I’ve really picked up my level of physical activity with beach volleyball, tennis, jogging and climbing (all socially-distanced) and I try to do these things with friends so we’re not just sitting around being depressed, although I do a bit of that too. 

I’m in a few group chats/online groups that have become important connections. I felt compelled to buy a TV early in lockdown and have started watching Jeopardy most nights. I’ve also become very attached to a weekly watch party of Selling Sunset. (When is Season 4 out?!).

Last week I saw The Painter and The Thief, a beautiful documentary with a quite unexpected narrative – highly recommend! I’m about to see Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and the Gutsy Girls Film Festival and I’m looking forward to both.  

I’m big into podcasts – Every Little Thing, Planet Money, Ologies, Everything is Alive, 99% Invisible, Heavyweight, old J Files, The Sporkful. People talking about things is my jam! I think it helps keep me engaged with people in the wider world.

My current music is always mostly old music – The Eels, Bon Iver, Delta Blues, Johnny Cash. When I need to get shit done in the studio it’s Girltalk or 80s hiphop. I’m a massive 80s fan in general – please invite me to karaoke!

I’ve just finished reading The Yield by Tara June Finch and brought 2 copies to give to friends because it was so good! Recently I also read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

FD: Who are some of the people who have shaped your practice, and why?

TB: Obviously my dad, through both his presence and his absence.

I aim to make work that is relevant and accessible to all Australians and my very large, very working class family scattered across rural Australia – the antithesis of the average art audience – are integral in maintaining a dialogue outside of the art bubble.  

Artists Sue Kneebone and Johnathan Jones have been influential mentors, both being excellent artists and human beings. Johnathan taught me to be more self-reflective as an artist and keep pushing the work further. From Sue I learnt a lot about critically informed research and much about the colonial settler histories with which we both have strong connections.

I have ongoing literal and imaginary conversations with many artists, curators, writers and thinkers that continue to influence my practice, but a few that come to mind are:

Rachel Whiteread, whose casts of negative spaces make the invisible visible, memorialising everyday moments and often at a monumental scale. She showed me a new way to think about memory and memorialisation and the presence of absence. Also she was the first woman to win the Turner Prize!

Janine Antoni continues to be an example of how to use the body as a site of making, exploring the psychology of making and incorporating embodied experience. Louise Bourgeois also showed me new ways to think about memory, particularly the murky messy emotions that are part of lived experience. And she’s just Louise fucking Bourgeois! Kara Walker is an ongoing inspiration for working with complex, difficult histories.

Fiona Hall was the first ever living, female, Australian sculptor that I knew to have a significant survey exhibition at the AGSA. She proved that the art life might be possible in a very tangible way, not just the domain of dead European men. Lisa Reihana has spoken about her love of beauty and using it as a political act: a way to draw people in, and get them to start to think. This resonates deeply with me and gave me permission to continue exploring the aesthetic possibilities. This wasn’t a conscious choice but I suspect seeing the glittering uncanny work of Tarryn Gill at the recent Adelaide Biennale and the Ramsey Prize might be responsible for my shift into sparkles.

FD: Do you have a favourite or particularly memorable exhibition that you saw at Firstdraft, and why?

TB: Living in Adelaide I’ve not been able to see many shows at Firstdraft but I fell in love with this building in 2016 during a residency at nearby Artspace. I think I’ve been figuring out how to use the space since then!

“It’s not a conscious choice, it’s a recognition of something that was already there.”

Tamara Baillie, Ribwreck, 2020, HCFC free polystyrene, sequins, fishing sinkers, sound 250 × 400 × 100 cm (approx.), installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist.

FD: Why did you want to become an artist?

TB: I was always a maker. My dad didn’t approve of women in trades and refused to let me apprentice with him so I went to art school instead. It’s not a conscious choice, it’s a recognition of something that was already there. For me art is a way of being alive: a way to be a human being and a way to connect with others.

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