Interview w Lisa Capon re: Jasmine Jan Studio Gallery Sunday Showcase

Posted on April 25, 2013 by

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Local jeweller Lisa Capon is working on some new treasures. Scheduled for a showing at Jasmine Jan’s Studio Gallery, the brooches and pendants are composed of hearts riveted onto layers of mottled metal and encircled by radiating faded patterns. The pieces are currently arranged at Capon’s studio workbench in chocolate box fashion, as though they’ve been given space to present themselves. Certainly the attention to detail manifest in each requires a little time to appreciate – viewers may otherwise easily miss the etched words hiding on the backs of some pieces, or the subtle textures particular to others.

“I spend a long time on them,” Capon nods wryly, going on to sketch some of the processes that go into just one of the works – sawing, filing, polishing, soldering, colouring, drilling and riveting just the tip of the iceberg. “There is a fair bit of technical know-how involved,” she concedes. It sounds like an understatement.

The meticulous way Capon approaches her craft issues from a real deference for the objects and materials themselves, beyond the way they may contribute to a finished work. “You can buy patterned metal, but I don’t,” she shrugs. “And although I have worked with old tins with beautiful designs or colour on them, I’m not into cannibalising old things to make new things unless it’s going to be a beautiful object that’s going to have a long life. Objects for me are triggers to memory, and memory is really important to me. I’m quite a sentimental person.”

As if to prove her point, Capon brings out a couple of 20th century artefacts she has salvaged from expeditions to the tip. Scrubbed up they now rest in serene retirement around her studio, at least until Capon creates a piece worthy of incorporating them. One a cast-iron stove flu door, the other a vintage air vent – they both quite discretely belong to a now-distant time for a now-distant purpose.

Capon turns to the inherent power she sees in objects both old and new when creating her own jewellery. “What I’m drawing from at the moment are matters of the heart: love and longing and a bit of homesickness,” Capon says, referring to the pieces on her workbench. “There are doily patterns that remind me of my grandmother and my mother, and of Adelaide. And the heart – emotions and the way we feel about things has always been really poignant.”

Capon’s work can generally be characterised by a concern with taking the wearer on explorations into meanings latent within their own tactility and materiality. Although viewers have missed their chance with Capon’s more ephemeral past creations – such as strings of rosary beads fashioned out of finely drilled, untempered anti-depressant pills – Capon does intend to exhibit pieces from previous bodies of work at this imminent exhibition. One of these include a series of smooth concave-shaped brooches, each carrying a secret message of endearment to the wearer in Braille. Intended to echo that indent above a person’s collarbone, the brooches are intimate in their form and feel. “I just love the idea of Braille in that someone who gives you that brooch chooses that message, and then it’s only you and that person who knows what it says,” she says. “But it’s actually quite tricky to do, setting a rivet in a concave shape. You need to take care otherwise you can mar the metal.”

From her patience with finicky methods to her recognition that the materials that compose her work have their own meaning and power, Capon’s jewellery is something to be seen up close and from several angles to be really seen. “The jewellery is designed to be handled and fondled,” she reveals. “It’s completely out of the glass case. I want to make things that speak to people, and to start a conversation with somebody else that notices them.”

You can treat your mum to a trip out of town this Mother’s Day to the rural creative haven that is Jasmine Jan’s Studio Gallery. Lisa Capon’s jewellery will be exhibited and available to buy throughout the Studio Gallery’s Sunday Showcase for May, along with the work of several other established Top End artists.

 

When: Every Sun in May | 10am-4pm

Where: Jasmine Jan Studio Gallery, 75 Herring Rd, Lambells Lagoon

Info: facebook.com/JasmineJanStudioGallery

First published at Off The Leash website

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Interview w Chayni Henry re: Foundation

Posted on April 19, 2013 by

Savvas-Motors“I used to work a lot faster before I started breeding,” Chayni Henry laughs. As open and engaging as her art, Henry’s just put her youngest to bed, made some tea, and is now kicking back in the bowerbird’s nest of a backyard studio she shares with her partner, fellow artist Franck Gohier. Surrounded by antique printing paraphernalia and sitting in a chair made of street signs, she’s talking about her upcoming solo show at Outstation Gallery in Parap – Foundation – an exhibition four years in the making. The show essentially features painted wooden cut outs of iconic Top End buildings, each accompanied by a handwritten anecdote in keeping with Henry’s distinctive style.

Meandering through both time and space in its scope, Foundation invites audiences to look at local history and culture via a tour of some of the more unique features of the Top End’s urban topography. From an eccentric bakery from 1920s Katherine, to what was then “the Don” (and is now “the Cav”), to a house built in post-Tracy “Grollo” style, Henry adopts a flexible approach to depicting her subject matter. “Time is quite rubbery in the way I’ve depicted the buildings,” she says. “Some are depicted the way they were when they were first built; others are depicted the way they are now. I’ve done the Boxing Croc (a Big Thing near Humpty Doo) as it is now – sort of falling apart, a bit sad and faded.”

Doing a series on buildings appealed to Henry for a few different reasons, she says. “I think initially I enjoyed the idea of the shape and form of buildings being ‘cut out’,” Henry muses. “You know, trying to translate a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional plane. And in a very loose fashion as well – not in the way you might traditionally do something like that. You see architects’ drawings, and these things” – she gestures at the cut outs – “kind of mock the preciseness of that, they’re all quite wonky and a bit crazy.”

Along with this technical challenge is Henry’s love of buildings themselves, and their histories. “I’ve trawled through photos in the NT Archives trying to get their stories,” she says. “I like to have the official historical story of the building to layer with my own personal tales of getting drunk and falling over, or seeing someone get bashed out the front of somewhere. Not that all my stories are like that,” she adds, laughing. “There are a lot more reflective personal experiences with buildings as well. But Darwin’s a rough town so there is violence and substance abuse involved.”

Personal attachment to the subject matter is expressed throughout the Foundation series and is characteristic of Henry’s art, which she describes as generally anecdotal. “The strongest voice in your art – when it’s at its most coherent – is when you’re speaking about something you’re familiar with and something you’re passionate about,” she says. “You create your own language.” With this in mind Henry agrees local audiences may be able to glean meanings from her work that escape people “down south” or overseas. Nevertheless, she adds, people from further afield do seem to connect with her work in other ways, a notion that’s evident when noting the demand from such national institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Australia – not to mention dozens of other art spaces across the country. “Surprisingly, really surprisingly,” she nods. “I suppose it’s because there are some things that are universal, and perhaps because my stories use humour as a way of mitigating some harsh subject matter. I think that appeals to people as well.”

Foundation opens at Outstation Gallery in Parap on Fri 3 May at 6pm. The show runs until Tues 28 May.

For more information visit http://www.outstation.com.au

First published at Off The Leash website

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Interview w Coco Meacham and David Wickens re: sentenced zine

Posted on April 4, 2013 by

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It wasn’t until a year had passed that a game of exquisite corpse, scribbled over a late-night glass of wine, blossomed into the first edition of sentenced zine. This zine followed the hodgepodge story of a wandering bean can and a forest of disused cutlery and was the result of a collaborative effort between just two contributors. This year Edition 2 is set to get even weirder, with sentences outsourced to the general public and pictures created by 22 diverse artists from across Australia.

sentenced zine is the brainchild of young couple David Wickens and Coco Meacham, travelling artists currently based in Darwin. Their project uses exquisite corpse to provide participating artists with random, isolated sentences for illustration. The often outlandish illustrations are then recompiled, pulling on the seams of the already loosely assembled narrative, and finally, painstakingly self-published in zine format. sentenced zine both hearkens back to the game’s 20th century Surrealist roots, and hones in on a contemporary focus: bringing together today’s emerging artists and their communities from around the country. These include several promising Darwin artists, as well as up and coming Sydney painter and recent Archibald entrant Daniel O’Toole (“Ears”).

“We cut up sentences that people had written on an old typewriter we’d set up at the first edition’s launch,” Wickens reveals. “Then we pulled the sentences out of a hat and gave them to the artists without telling them anything about the rest of the story.”

“All the works have been created individually with each artist’s own interpretation and style,” Meacham says. “But it’s turned out that where one work has used this vibrant pink, it is balanced by the work next to it that has these warm tones, which then bleeds out into a cooler green. So although there’s this element of randomness, somehow the show flows. It actually does come together visually.”

Any cohesive element perceived in this edition of sentenced zine could be investigated as an expression of unconscious reality and mental contagion, ideas that so captured the old Surrealists. And indeed there are common pressures on the daily lives of emerging artists in Australia today – the need to stand out, the need to self-promote, the need to pay the bills and the need to compete in cold, investable terms. But then, sentenced zine quite consciously aims to address such issues anyway.

“As emerging artists ourselves, and having a lot of friends who are always wanting to do something new and creative, it was nice to think we could start a platform for undiscovered talent and have an exhibition together,” Wickens says. “Artist communities down south are under a bit of a dark cloud when it comes to thinking about what’s going on creatively up here in Darwin. Sometimes it feels like it’s only through our conversations with them that they realise there’s actually stuff going on elsewhere in the country.”

“We’d like to expand,” Meacham says. “We’re taking the exhibition of the original works to Sydney after the Darwin launch this year, and next year we’d like to tour the exhibition to Melbourne as well. I’d like to tour it to a number of places actually.”

“We’ve already doubled the edition number of the last zine,” Wickens’ adds. “We’ll be stocking the zine in a few places across the country.”

Though ambitious in their plans for the future of the project (Wickens intends to explore live art sideshows, and Meacham wants to involve creative writers and even filmmakers into the next edition), the pair are confident that sentenced zine HQ belongs in Darwin for the foreseeable future.

“The arts community is ridiculously supportive up here, particularly through DVAA (Darwin Visual Arts Association),” Meacham says. “They’re such an important reason why we’re still here.”

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sentenced zine Edition 2 launches at Woods Street Gallery in Darwin on April 5. The Darwin exhibition runs from April 5 to April 27. The Sydney exhibition is to be launched at 107 Projects in Redfern Sydney on July 4.

For more: http://sentencedzine.wordpress.com/

Originally published in Off The Leash website, April 3 2013

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Harriet Body – The 24 Hours Series

Posted on October 2, 2012 by

Dot dot dot. Grammatically speaking, this symbol (“ellipsis”) is used to signify an omission of one or more words from a greater section of text, and often indicates an indefinite beginning or end. In Harriet Body’s The 24 Hours Series – Dots, the ellipsis itself is repeated indefinitely, if imperfectly, spilling over onto a second sheet of paper with eternally unsaid things, stopping only when the 24 hours allocated for painting sequential dots has run out… Left behind lie a choppy sea of ellipses, hypnotically hinting that the distinction between art and void (or the space that features zero creative effort) is illusory.

It’s a surreptitious statement that filters its way through the entire 24 Hours Series. The body of work features three central pieces, each a document of a different 24-hour period devoted to one consistent creative act: painting dots, filming paper and cracking eggs. The series aims to explore the importance of making itself, going so far as to suggest that the artistic value of the creative process is infinitely higher than the finished product. The 24 Hours Series can be regarded as a campaign for this idea, a presentation of artefacts that hope to communicate the importance of their conception and gestation, Chinese-whispers style. They do this in a somewhat pathetic effort to get the audience on the door, free entry into a world to which they once belonged – vapid starlets acting parts although the curtain fell long ago.

Still, just as volcanic activity may be deducted from igneous rock, glimpses of that world may be seen in The 24 Hours Series. The way the dotted lines occasionally veer and congeal in Dots suggest the topography of influential feelings and ideas Body felt over the day and night she spent painting. A moving shadow on Paper insinuates that the artist had to answer the phone, or fetch a snack. The 24 egg yolks in Egg – pooled neatly here, running overboard there – testify to the 24 accompanying egg whites Body fried and ate; surely to the point of utter ennui. Empathy, the mouthpiece for the human condition, connects the audience to the artist’s experience. Meanwhile, as the exhibited works flex their phantom limbs – the technicalities of which are left to the audience’s imaginations – Body makes the point that the creative process appears in a sudden collision of slow-cooked and unassuming circumstances, or in other words – like magic, out of nowhere, really.

It’s in this “dust thou art” way that The 24 Hours Series equates the idea of the void with the idea of art. Art springs from the void (of daily routine, of mundane necessity) just as the void springs from art (the visage that conceals its own inevitably inaccessible fount: the creative process). “What is absolutely crucial to the artist’s happiness is the creative process,” Body herself declares, defying outright the idea that the artist’s lot in life consists of chasing an end product. Any potency The 24 Hours Series has as a creative spur – for those who consider it in their weekly opening rounds, or those on a night out with an arty friend, or those who chance to quench a passing curiosity – is rendered a knock-on effect, supporting the notion that the creative process is both the true and the inherently, maddeningly incomprehensible source of artistic merit…

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Interview w Shilo McNamee re: Darwin Life Drawing

Posted on October 1, 2012 by

Darwin Life Drawing sketches
Courtesy of Shilo McNamee

One of the things that characterises untutored life drawing sessions across the board – apart from the fact there’s always at least one person there posing with their kit off – is the tacit silence that accompanies them. It seems like it should be awkward as hell, sitting in a ring around someone naked as the day they were born, with no effort from anyone to break the ice beyond a mild chat over an Arnotts biscuit and a cup of tea during break time. But apart from the sparse instructions from the organiser to the model that the time for a pose is up, people barely speak at all.

“You get very in the zone when you draw,” Winnellie Art Space’s life drawing organiser Shilo McNamee explains. “It’s like meditation. Once you have a certain rhythm and you know what you’re doing, I think it ends up like that for a lot of people.”

McNamee has been running life drawing classes for almost five years now, following a series of sessions she attended as a student of Fine Arts at CDU. “The technical lecturer started them on a whim in the evenings, but then she left and there was nothing in Darwin,” she says. “So we took over at the uni and we were running it there for a while, but once we had finished our degree we couldn’t anymore.”

In attempting to find a venue that would host sessions, McNamee can personally testify to the misunderstanding many people have of life drawing. “It’s been a real, real, struggle trying to find venues.” Mcnamee reveals. “Our needs are simple – we just need a private room. But we’ve called community spaces, church halls, primary schools, high schools – all of them are sort of like, ‘Oh, are you going to have a naked person running around?’ As if as soon as someone gets naked they’re going to start running around the room.”

After many months of concerted effort – and written endorsement from DVAA – McNamee has recently managed to nab regular spots on Friday evenings and Sunday mornings at Winnellie Art Space. Yet for those unfamiliar with life drawing (and open to the idea it’s perhaps more than a pastime of perverts) the question remains: why life drawing at all?

McNamee thinks there are a variety of reasons why life drawing can be a valuable activity for the wider community: “A lot of people who come are professionals in other fields. There was a time when our whole class was comprised of doctors and lawyers, so, you know, respectable people do it too! Not just us deviant arty types,” McNamee laughs, adding that life drawing sessions provide a focused space where amateurs may devote some time to developing their drawing skills. “I think for those people who have a full-time demanding job like that, it’s that meditation thing again, where it’s like stress relief.”

The fact that the Winnellie Art Space sessions neither have a teacher looking over your shoulder nor any requirement that participants have to show their sketches emphasises this concentration on the drawing process itself. Yet coupled with this tendency of untutored life drawing sessions to help people get “in the zone” of drawing is the significance of the subject itself: the naked figure.

On a personal note, I’ve been going to life drawing sessions for a few years, from ones run by hippies in freezing Melbourne warehouses to ones run by lecturers in decked out Sydney studios. I’ve kind of always thought of it as an almost therapeutic exercise in destroying various institutionalised notions: of what a person should look like, of why a person should cover up, of what makes a drawing worth drawing. By the simple attempt to represent something stripped back to all its honesty I think parallels can be drawn with punk philosophy: Down with the airbrushed ideas of what people look like. Down with the idea that your drawing has to be anything more than about just drawing for its own sake. And – in effect – just down with institutionalised notions we’ve all been conditioned to absorb to a certain degree. But that’s just me.

McNamee, a professional artist and illustrator, has her own take on life drawing: “From an artist’s perspective, if you do want to represent people in your work, then you should know what the human body looks like,” she explains. “You really get a sense of the diversity when you draw a lot of different models. I used to perceive the figure in a completely different way. When you’re first starting out at art school, there are standard proportions that you use to draw the figure when you don’t have the model, but once you’ve got the model standing in front of you, that stuff kind of goes out the window. Plus, you can instantly tell when someone’s drawn from life as opposed to copying a photograph. When you’re drawing from life you’re taking 3D and you have to make it 2D, so you have to deconstruct it, you’ve got to worry about foreshortening and perspective. There are all these other things you’ve got to think about while you draw,” she says, stressing the technical skills that life drawing helps to develop.

Provided running the classes remains a sustainable venture, McNamee has exciting plans for the future of life drawing at Winnellie Art Space. Taking a leaf out of the book of some of the more out-there life drawing sessions happening interstate and overseas – including classes with themes such as burlesque (complete with feathers, top hats and suspenders) – McNamee is looking at some creative twists for life drawing sessions. Currently she’s working on sourcing actors to channel various situations to sketchers: “Surely we’ve got creative and kooky characters in Darwin,” she laughs, adding that initial efforts to find such models has proved challenging. “I’m at a loss of how to get in contact with these people. Do they read the paper?”

And on that note: are you a creative/kooky character, and are you looking to make some dough out of it? Contact Shilo: shilo.mcnamee@gmail.com. People generally interested in life drawing/modelling can also register their interest in attending classes via this email address.

Life Drawing at Winnellie Art Space: 6pm-9pm Fridays, 9am-12pm Sundays

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Interview w Natalie Sprite re: The Darwin Fridge Festival

Posted on September 25, 2012 by

It’s only been a couple of years since a typo in an email to Darwin Community Arts resulted in a fridge-themed art exhibition outside the Malak shops one afternoon – but that hasn’t stopped this year’s Fridge Festival from evolving in leaps and bounds from its humble car park beginnings.

Living in a tropical city, we have a lot of love for the fridge. In fact, this month Darwin will celebrate the old ice box with its own festival, a colourful two week program of cool art and music events.

“I find it very exciting when things grow of their own momentum,” director Natalie Sprite says enthusiastically of the Fridge Festival’s growth spurt, attributing it almost entirely to the support of the wider community. “And this is the thing, if someone comes to us and says, ‘This is the thing we want to do,’ my job is to help facilitate make that happen. The fridge works in lots and lots of ways, but it should never limit people,” she continues. “If it will help people make art, that’s fantastic, but I would hate it to stop someone making art.”

Effectively, this year’s festival has taken a variety of non-fridge-specific creative endeavours under its extensive wing – from hosting popular (mostly) local outfit Country Town Collective’s new album launch at Happy Yess to exhibiting hefty scrap steel sculptures welded together by prisoners at Darwin Correctional Centre.

Local sculptor Paul Hill has been running the welding workshops and notes the level of commitment shown by the low-security inmates involved. “They’re very engaged,” he says. “And some have really come through as talented sculptors. One guy here, Joel Pascoe, a young fella from out Maningrida way, he was just hanging around the workshops quietly, then he came and made a little chicken. Next thing he’s making a four-metre crocodile, and then a life-sized mermaid. From no previous experience to a daggy little chicken to a life-sized mermaid. I’d be offering him suggestions and he’d just quietly go, ‘No, I think I want to do it like this.’ And he’d be absolutely right. I think he’s definitely come through as a talent – a big talent. He’s discovered himself as an artist.” Other sculptures the prisoners have produced include a huge shark and a couple of towering brolgas. All will be exhibited amongst the whitegoods on display along the Lantern-lit Fridge Walk at the Darwin Waterfront.

The humble fridge remains the festival’s most recognisable feature. “The fridges are iconic,” Sprite says. “People who wouldn’t paint on a canvas will paint on a fridge. And some of the best artworks have come from people who don’t identify as artists.”

Nightcliff Primary School teacher Jo Glennon testifies to the inspiring effect a fridge can have on budding artists. As the school’s arts teacher last year, Glennon witnessed the way her transition classes responded to fridge art workshops with local painter Marita Albers. “It got them to start thinking out of the square,” she says. “Also, working with Marita, she has her own style which was good for the kids to see – that you don’t have to do an outline one way, you can have all these other little techniques.” Glennon believes her students retained Albers’ workshops’ lessons on the creative process even after the Fridge Festival had wrapped up: “I noticed more risk-taking, because they weren’t so worried about what was right or wrong. Which is ultimately what you want them to get out of the arts.”

O’Loughlin Catholic College art teacher Joanne Green agrees that the Fridge Festival has been a prolific platform for art students. The secondary school also entered fridges in the 2011 Fridge Festival, to widespread acclaim. “There was a big buzz at the school last year because we got such good media coverage, so my current students are really keen and really excited,” Green reveals. “They’re coming in at lunch time and recess. When your work is exhibited and you see people’s reactions, it’s validating.” This year three year 11 students from O’Loughlin entering work into the festival, a trio of bar fridge figures loosely influenced by the work of Mambo artists such as Reg Mombassa. “They’re all going to be very bright,” Green laughs. “They’ll really stand out this year.”

“At the end of these workshops, people know that their art is going to be exhibited as part of a festival that’s getting national and in some cases international coverage,” Sprite says, nodding once more to the festival’s crucial ingredient of community. “So people get really focussed and really excited, and we’re able to connect all those people through the exhibition. The festival is really shaped by the people who support it.”

Published in Off The Leash, October Issue

 

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“One of my philosophies with the Fridge Festival is that it is the shape of the people who support it,” states Fridge Festival director Natalie Sprite, “So that can be anybody; from community groups like Mission Australia, to sponsors like the NT government, to local artists like Karen Roberts and Marita Albers.” Initially such a statement seems to speak counterintuitively of a rather backseat approach for a director. However, further conversation with Sprite quickly reveals the actively inclusive measures the Fridge Festival goes to in sourcing its supporters, and consequently the hugely ambitious connotations of her professed philosophy.

This year’s Fridge Festival sprawls past the confines of its humble beginnings as an afternoon in a suburban car park two years ago. The program spans two weeks over several venues across Darwin, and is not only chock-a-block with things to see, hear and do, but is generally characterised by a focus on celebrating the creativity of the greater Top End community for the greater Top End community’s sake: from primary school children to prisoners, from people living in remote regions to people living with mental illness.

Practically speaking, one of the ways the Fridge Festival realises its aim to inspire and unify through creativity is by linking local artists with a wide range of community groups. Through facilitating the creative workshops that contribute the art for fridge or esky-themed exhibitions, the Fridge Festival provides common ground to connect often-segregated social brackets.

“Sometimes you think art is just this big, wanky middle-class indulgence,” Sprite exclaims. “What I love about this festival is that it’s so clearly not. Art is something that does have potential to change people’s lives.”

While the fridge itself remains the most recognisable feature of the Fridge Festival, Sprite prefers to think of the whitegood in symbolic terms. “Last year I carried so many fridges that I really thought this year perhaps we could do a paper lantern festival instead,” she laughs, recalling her first year as Fridge Festival director. “But what the fridge does is it breaks down all the elitist stuff around art, because it’s domestic and it’s humble and it’s ubiquitous. People who wouldn’t paint on a canvas will paint on a fridge. And some of the best artworks have come from people who don’t identify as artists.”

The Fridge Festival kicks off with the launch of Darwin Waterfront’s Lantern-lit Fridge Walk. The family-friendly opening night celebrations will also feature local live music, spoken word poetry, laser art, and sculptural installations – all non-fridge-specific elements fully embraced by the festival program across its two-week period.  “We keep that thread of the fridge, but it should never limit people,” Sprite explains, expressing her excitement that local support for the festival has come in such a multitude of forms. “This is a community-based festival, so it only exists if the community wants it. What is amazing is the groundswell of support that has come, and how it has just continued to grow and grow.”

Published at artsHub

Visit The Darwin Fridge Festival website.

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DRAFT: Cafes

Posted on September 24, 2012 by

I’ve worked in a few cafes in my time. Such jobs taught me to despise customers, and vow quite sincerely that I would never work in hospitality ever again. But cafés didn’t engender this hatred by virtue of any inherent evilness. I do not regret one minute working in cafes – they introduced me to society.

It’s not a role just anyone can handle, the waitress role. You are flung in the faces of an entire spectrum of people: the unwarrantably arrogant young men who don’t look you in the eye when they tell you what they want, the flustered mothers who don’t have any time or energy for anyone else but their children running rampant, the elderly who have outlived the institutions that were once relevant, who look at you when you take their order as though trying to hear a distant voice through a tin can. It was character-building – a bootcamp for all fretful introverts. The customer spectrum represents all the idiosyncrasies of our culture: the fads (soy piccolo latte), the narratives (the customer is always right), the long, meandering river of history that birthed it all.

But no, once you begin to cotton on that you have been dumped on a grand stage, under blinding floodlights, the novelty of being so intimately privy to the entire show fades pretty quickly. You’re a meagre character struggling to keep up with the various protagonists as they swan on and off, and you soon get sick of the lot of them. You begin to blame them, hate them, for their metaphorical connotations. You begin to see them as genres of people rather than real people, of two-dimensional figures cut out by circumstances, the same circumstances that give rise to the sickening cliques they adhere to, wet uniform shapes stuck on concrete.

In my case, I began to construct bitter, exaggerated theories in my head. I saw customers as ignorant purveyors of a system of economic slavery in their belief that “the customer is always right”. The customer is always right? Surely that notion echoes out of structural dictatorship, not democracy. I am paid enough to provide a technical service, mesdames et monsieurs, not kiss your arse while I’m doing it. Would you dream of talking to me – to anyone! – like that if you didn’t have that money in your hand? This is a free and equal country after all, isn’t it? Isn’t it? (Cue wolfing down of cake or, later, a hearty slosh of Mishka and Emma and Tom.)

I got pretty jaded.

But I’ll never blame cafes themselves. As a consumer of long blacks, soups of the day and banana smoothies myself, I love cafes. They are for me, as much as they are for everyone else.

I love to go there by myself, to sit and people-watch. I like to see the middle-aged man with the paper and the coffee and the creases on his brow sit with his hand to his temple, like a statue for several minutes, or until he shakes out the broadsheet to turn a page. I like to see the children earnestly negotiate the terms of an imaginary game. I like to see the girl sit tapping on her phone with a shiny pointed nail, compulsively smoothing the perfect bauble that is her hair, elbows on the table like a nervous bird on a perch.

I hardly ever read when I go to a cafe alone. I save that for when I have company, which I guess is kind of contrary, thinking about it now. It’s one of my favourite things though, being hungover together reading together, shovelling down the heavenly carbs while those superhuman staff flitter about taking shit, or – more sensibly – delivering it.

Cafes are the bastions of Australian culture in a lot of ways. They’re much of a muchness, really, travelling in the same direction – if at varying distances – behind the conveyor belt of food trends. They never overshoot themselves into restaurant status. Cafes have a special power in that they’re for the people, in more ways than one. Peeling posters, art on the walls, dog-eared children’s books, the inevitable Merv or Bev in the corner with today’s crossword – all a big butcherpaper sketch of the surrounding community. I was amazed at the lack of cafes when I visited Europe. I thought there’d be even more than in Australia, spilling out into French boulevards, tucked into London alleys, sporting cheap fare and a place to sit down and fuck around for hours on end. I didn’t realise they were a modern invention, an Australian one no less.

But things are changing as well. Shiny imposters that look like cafes but act like vending machines are multiplying. Sterile places where the staff wear uniforms and requests to stick up a poster are denied as a matter of course. Despite the fact I would never again work in a café if I could help it, I do hope to god they don’t die out. That would be a real tragedy.

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