Were you picking up plastic with the intention of using it, or was it initially just to get it off the beach?
At the beginning, I was just going to take it to the local recycling centre at the tip. Then after I’d collected maybe five or ten of these jumbo bags I realised I could imagine using this stuff in some way that was artistic.
Did you set out to make environmental art or art that would have a political message?
No I never did. When I moved into this new home and decided to make driftwood furniture, the sole intention was just to make something beautiful for the home I’d just moved into. I went to remote places along the Victorian coast where it was just four-wheel driving and venturing out to islands on boats, where huge logs of driftwood were being washed ashore and parched by the sun and the salt and knocked about on the rocks.
Can you tell me something of your artistic back ground?
I went to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. I began in 1977 and I was there for three years. During that time I was fortunate enough to have a number of key figures in the Australian art world lecturing there and it was a very free environment. You were just allotted your own studio space and you were pretty much left to our own devices during that whole time, with ongoing really excellent feedback coming from the various lecturers, (in between their games of chess).
I have often been asked why are there so many different approaches to environmental art. I can only really go to into depth about my own specific approach to environmental art and why it is called that and mention a few other artists who I am aware of that have also had the environment feature strongly in their work.
A fire destroyed my studio in 1983, taking seven years work with it. It shook my foundations as a person and brought me face to face with my mortality. It influenced my transition through a fairly diverse range of art practice and made the later transition to found objects easier, because I became less rigid as a person.
Promoting art is about promoting yourself, not in a crass, “see how wonderful I am” way, but in a way that promotes your vision, the core of what makes you…well, you. It takes courage, promoting art and putting yourself out there for public inspection, but so does creating art that tells your private truth.
Promoting art isn’t so much about the art itself as the issue or feeling the art speaks to. So what drives you to create art? For me, it’s often oneness with humanity and ecological concerns. For you it may be different, but whatever gets you going is the key to exciting audiences and successfully promoting your art.
To me, “artist help” means two things: inspiration for the artist and inspiration from the artist. And the older and, it’s hoped, wiser I get, the more I realize that the latter – artist help defined as service to humanity at large – is the best way to get the former.
John Dahlsen is a leader in his field of Environmental art. He has developed a number of products, which include books, e-books, CDs, DVDs, subscriber based newsletters and seminars, which can help give vital assistance with the more pressing questions artists are currently facing with today’s unpredictable economy.
I intend to assist with understanding in these areas, by posting these thoughts about the current crisis, most probably experienced by many artists and those involved with the arts.
