BMA Arts

Artist Robbie Karmel’s main focus is drawing and embodiment— looking at how we use the body to draw and how we can use drawing to examine the body and embodied experience. Over his thrilling career—which includes starting a studio, completing a PhD, and art, art, and…

Arts origin story?

I’ve always been a drawer; in high school, I drew a lot of morbid sketches of bodies and hung out in the art rooms a lot. I went to the ANU School of Art for my undergrad and honours, where I was exposed to printmaking and performance and did a lot of life drawing.

Around this time, I was doing a lot of life drawing and self-portraiture, and I began to embed my body in the work a lot more through performative drawing processes.

During my Masters, I visited the UK and stumbled on a guy called Barn the Spoon who had a little shop in Hackney where he sat carving wooden spoons all day, and it triggered something in me. When I returned, I got an axe and a knife and tried to whittle a few spoons, quickly expanding into hand-tool woodworking. I became absorbed in how we use and learn-to-use tools, and how social these practices are in their sharing and teaching.

So for my Masters and PhD, this became integrated with my drawing practice and I started making what I called performative studio furniture, objects that I would climb on or wear or use in some way to produce drawings both with and on. I invited people to draw, so it became a collaborative and experiential process.

Tell us all about your upcoming exhibition. As a fan of the Greylock analog horror series, I am exceptionally fascinated with Tulpas and firmly believe in art as a therapeutic practice.

It’s a big show, there’s a lot going on! The Tulpa drawings began in 2021. I had a rough time during the lockdowns and have ongoing mental health conditions that got pretty bad during that period. At one point, I was hospitalised for a few weeks, and while there, I started doing a drawing every day just to get myself doing something.

I began to draw with a lot of colour, which isn’t something I’d really explored previously. I was trying to activate something joyful within myself. I was also looking into Internal Family Systems, a psychological framework that considers the self as being made up of different parts within us, each with a voice. Sometimes, we’re a gestalt of these different voices functioning well together; sometimes, we have internal conflicts, and sometimes, one voice will take the wheel and override all the others.

The drawings became manifestations of these internal figures. Not illustrations of specific characters, but using drawing as a process to give form to feelings, to articulate and to tease out and untangle the difficult shit. So the Tulpa drawings are that; using drawing to make sense of a wet, messy, dissected body.

I was talking to a friend on the phone about all this, and he brought up the phenomena of tulpamancers, groups of people on the internet who deliberately develop imaginary friends, often pop culture characters, whom they consider wilful and independently sentient. The term Tulpa is an appropriation from Buddhism, stolen and largely decontextualised by early 20th-century Western esoteric occultists to describe forms or beings brought into being by thought, so I must acknowledge that it’s not an unproblematic term. I need help understanding its original Buddhist form.

The exhibition also includes a lot of woodwork, notably the bowls and spindles turned on the lathe. So, the Tulpa part of the exhibition is very much about “Sitting” in the title, and the turned objects are the “Standing and Turning” part of the show. Woodworking and wood turning, like drawing, have significant therapeutic value, most obviously as productive and mindful processes; you have to focus on what you’re doing; you can’t rush things; it is attentive, meditative, and mindful. In my recovery making things has been an effort towards behavioural activation, another psychological term, but doing something, anything, to get yourself moving again, even if you feel bloody horrible while doing it.

The Head Bowls are a series of turned wooden bowls worn on the head to draw on and performed in different ways. For this show, I’ll have groups of five people wearing them and drawing on their own bowls and on each other. This is the culmination of many of these threads, my investigations into embodiment, tool use, collaborative making, and art as a social and therapeutic practice.

What do you explore through art?

Some of the more prominent themes are political; I have much to say about the disabled experience and how our government treats the vulnerable, both here and abroad. The most recent drawings have a lot more green and bodies that are mutilated in much more distressing ways, very much as a response to the horrors in Palestine at the moment. I’m moving very slowly on this, but I think the trauma that both produced these events and that these events are producing is something that we do not currently have the language to really understand, let alone address.

And can you tell us more about Studio Studio?

I started Studio Studio with Richard Blackwell in 2019 when I finished my PhD and moved back to Canberra; it’s been a wild ride! We share the space, and both run our practices out of the studios; we have a machines room, a print studio, and a nice big gallery/ project space. We have the occasional exhibition and host residencies, I’m also hoping to start teaching my own workshops out of the space in the next year or two, but it’s a lot to get these things going. We’re hosting a group exhibition of Gungahlin-based artists with Gungahlin Arts called Inhabited, which opens on the 3rd of May. I’m very excited about it! >> Head to the Belco Arts website for more information<<

Who/what influences you as an artist?

I look at as much stuff as possible, especially drawing and print media. Some classic favourites are Goya, Jim Dine, Jenny Saville, Marlene Dumas and Joseph Beuys. I have to acknowledge Mike Parr’s influence and presence in the field of drawing and performance as it relates to interrogating and representing the self. I’ve already mentioned media and world affairs, particularly with how the internet works. It’s impossible not to be influenced by that stuff, and we are going through such a strange and unprecedented time with how we broadcast and receive images and information. We’re seeing the impact on how we make art and how we use it to understand and respond to it. Also, I listen to a lot of The Drones; anything by Gareth Liddiard is gold. The guy knows how to say shit.

Of what are you proudest so far?

Studio Studio, we’re building something exceptional here. I’m also thrilled with the Head Bowls. They’re the resolute form of so many things I’ve been working towards for a long time, and I’m just starting with them!

What are your plans for the future?

In the short term, I’m doing a project with Hands On Studio and Megalo Print Studio over the next few months, and I’m very excited about it. I’ve also been doing a lot of printmaking at Megalo, something I last did a while ago, I pulled my first lithograph since undergrad yesterday, and I’m going to really delve into it.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Phew, no, I think that covers everything! Sorry, I’ve written you a short book there.

Three very contemporary exhibitions are now showing at Tuggeranong Arts Centre.

Sitting Standing Turning presents an eclectic range of work from the breadth of Robbie Karmel’s practice, including drawing, handmade furniture, printmaking, and performance. He pushes traditional mark making to its boundaries by creating works collaboratively during performances using hand-crafted wooden objects.

Up and coming glass artist Louis Grant creates minimalist sculpture that takes contemporary glass into the realm of colour-field installation. His work investigates queer identity through the medium of glass, while interrogating notions of gendered practice.

The three ABODE artists focus on dwellings; how and where people live, either by choice, through design or due to circumstance. How are feelings of security associated with “home” affected by change, transience, or the need to improvise shelter? ABODE includes sculpture, video and installation.

For more information on opening times etc please visit the Tuggeranong Arts Centre website.