'Artist Interviews' a series of interviews with established artists on what keeps them going and what are some of the highs and lows of their careers.
Thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Tell us a bit about your practice and you, the artist, that you are comfortable to share.
Thank you for the invitation for this artist interview.
After my original training as a teacher, I studied sculpture and printmaking at RMIT, and this has informed my practice since. Working during a period when Conceptual Art was prominent, I collaborated with Lance Walker in a major project called ‘Newsgame’. Before computers and the internet, printed newspapers were ubiquitous as conveyers of information and read voraciously by train commuters. The Age had its own art section covering current exhibitions and performances. We placed 10 weekly 'Newsgame' ads in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper (the ads were anonymous, playful, irreverent and interactive) – the responses from readers and our ‘art’ commentary were later shown at Bruce Pollard’s historic Pinacotheca Gallery in Richmond.
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Down by the Station #2, photograph of passengers waiting on Flinders Street Station, 1975. |
It was nearly another 20 years, due to my work commitments, before I was able to commit to a new project. I was working for the environmental education unit, the Gould League of Victoria, where I was writing and editing educational material, mainly for primary school teachers and children. It was intense and deadline focused creative work (not dissimilar to an ad agency’s processes where conceptual and creative ideas are developed and put into production with time and financial restraints – or an art practice). The work was exciting, flexible and pressured.
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Down by the Station #5 (Train Ride to Glory), photograph of commuting passengers reading newspapers on a train, 1975. |
I love not knowing where a new idea will take me. Many small steps can take you around the world.
When I eventually returned to do my master’s at the VCA – again, I was a (very) mature-aged student – my colleagues ranged in age from early twenties to over fifty, and the excitement of being in an art school (for all their inherent problems) was counterbalanced by everyone’s enthusiasm to try something new. Each artist brought their own ideas about what their ‘art’ is and discussions were lively. Some were more advanced theoretically, or knew more of their historical context, or had an extensive personal history in their career. You worked hard to refine your voice. Solve the problems you faced. Define your process. Your motivation. Your stories. It was the right environment to fearlessly make changes. I took a small step into the unknown and kept going.
While wandering around a well-known hardware store, I found some coloured cloth tape in a limited range of colours, a certain width and self-adhesive. Here was colour, texture, line, shape, contrast, and tone in one medium – just apply the elements of art. Some experimentation with application and playing with design proved promising, and I was off – I had found a new way to compose or construct an image. After finding a suitable support, it was a matter of finding techniques that worked and those that needed to be avoided.
Over 200 small experimental pieces were completed within six months, exhibited and put into the world. The works became more interesting. New shapes were tried. The construction became the work. Scale and complexity developed and opportunities to show them followed with a series of institutional exhibitions. I was constructing my own visual language from non-traditional materials in dialogue with historical and contemporary art forms. |
| Black Delta, 2016, cloth tape on 4 triangular MDF panels, 170 cm x 340 cm. Master of Fine Art Exhibition, Victorian College of the Arts. |
What is a personal achievement for you that you would like to share.
The dangers of complacency as a visual artist are always a challenge. Playing it safe, repeating a formula, without exploration or personal development – and you threaten your raison d'être.I had been working from my Southbank studio at Boyd in Southbank for nearly a decade but it was about to be demolished and I had to relocate to Brunswick – not particularly convenient but near a station – when the Covid pandemic hit and much of the world shut down and we were restricted to a localized area. With a solo show booked, the tapes, fortunately, were a clean material to work with and so I was able to work on small pieces from home. An installation was required and I had been making large singular works, but they were impossible with the restrictions we were facing.
Beginning with a simple repeated image on small wooden discs – black with a narrow white stripe across the middle – they became my binary code. An alternating white line horizontal or vertical – a black and white matrix in twelve rows. I then applied a random system to the matrix, dividing it into three sets of four rows, and throwing dice to place the four colours I was going to use – red, blue, yellow and green – one colour per row from which diagonals would radiate.
Chance and systems clashed. As I did the work, the work began to develop and change. There had been no preliminary drawing; no image, thumbnail sketch or even a conceptual idea (other than the simple white line on one small disc); and no awareness of scale – it was growing like ‘topsy’. At no stage could I lay the work out to consider some aspect. The most I could test was about a square metre of discs. I would not find out if the installation would work until it was on the gallery wall.
01000001 01101110 00100000 01001001 01101101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101110 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110
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| An Imaginary Constellation, 2019, cloth tape on 516 MDF discs, 174 cm x 639 cm (detail). Installation, Five Walls Projects, Melbourne. |
Conversely art is not a constant rosy path. What is a challenging experience you have had in art and how did you come to terms with it?
The major challenge I had faced was the impact of work on my art practice. After over a decade at the Gould League, I had to return to teaching art with its regularity and rituals.
Teaching in schools, with its daily interactions, planning, organisation, and repeated activities – seemingly without end, for myself, was not amenable to consistency and progressive development of ideas and production of creative works. While I was enjoying teaching art, it wasn’t enough to be personally fulfilled as an artist. It had been too long since I had a practical commitment. I hadn’t the energy or time during the school terms to venture into my studio. I might have been able to cobble together some studio time during the holidays at the end of each term. Ideas would flow, works begun – even finished – but teaching would start again, interrupting and stifling the flow. This start-stop timetable was frustrating; your head, full of exciting ideas, would be somewhere else in three months’ time and you would start the creative process again, and again.During one such cycle – for whatever reason – one evening I went out to the studio, got out the acrylic paints and completed five paintings before, fulfilled and satiated, I went to bed. In retrospect, they were meaningless and probably pretty bad, but they were enough of a start for me to regularly go out in the evening to work in the studio.
I think you have to be doing something, making, drawing, constructing anything, that stimulates the brain and the creative juices into being able to make progress. The ideas for the work originate out of doing the work. Doing one thing creates the next response. A never-ending cycle of solutions.
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Irregular Polygon #1, 2025, acrylic and enamel on round panel, 100 x 100 cm. Five Walls Projects. |
How do you think the art world and/or the artists life could be improved? For example, many artists work multiple jobs, and an artist often has to wear many ‘hats'.
During the Great Depression, the US Federal government, under President Roosevelt’s 'New Deal for the forgotten man', introduced the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to stimulate the economy and offered artist’s commissions for public art works. It was a profound idea: the RWA program sowed the seeds for American cultural dominance whilst fostering resilience and pride in American culture and history. Artists also made meaningful contributions to the desperate lives of ordinary citizens: perhaps there is a need today.
In the art industry, apart from the major blockbuster promotions of the big galleries and the big money art prizes, wouldn’t it be wonderful if small commercial and artist-run spaces also received coverage. I don’t know what happens in our news outlets today, but when we produced ‘Newsgame’ half a century ago, it was in direct response to the arts pages in The Age newspaper. At that time, The Age had a dedicated weekend arts section. They had specialist arts correspondents who contributed long thoughtful reflections and discussion about individual artists and performances which led to community dialogue.
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Folded Irregular Polygon #4, 2025, patinated bronze, 7.5 x 20 x 21 cm. Five Walls Projects. |
To contact Ray and see more of his work visit: https://www.instagram.com/raymondcarterart/
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