How did we get here?

I haven’t always been a musician.

In another life, I spent my days trawling through art books, rolling my eyes at opaque abstract paintings, and reluctantly wandering through galleries trying my hardest to appear interested.

A hotel somewhere in Rotorua wondering why I’m not off somewhere else writing a song.

Don’t get me wrong, visual art is something I love, but my attention span was wired short well before the invention of TikTok. I’m convinced this is where my fascination with the absurd, the macabre, and general creepiness originated. It’s easier to pay attention to a surgeon slash mummified crow washing its humanoid hands, than to a stare at a picture of a flower. Probably a character flaw I could work on.

I was good enough at photography to get by, so a three-year degree was my ticket to adulting, stage one.

Are you even a photographer if you haven’t photographed a ghostly woman in the water? This was part of a series I created about twins and people who looked alike. Maybe a little bit about loneliness and self-destruction.

I actually went to art school twice. Photography first, and then Fine Art. There’s something about visual expression that feels comfortable and familiar to me, if not slightly frustrating and flat at times.

I started to make video/moving image work during my undergraduate degree at UNITEC Institute of Technology. It was then that I realised how transformative sound could be, how visual sound could be. I started making sound art and there was an ease to it that I hadn’t experienced before. For some unknown reason, I pivoted to 3D object making, which ultimately triggered the downfall of my fine art practice.

Images from a series where I basically tortured my own face to explore being uncomfortable in my own skin.

During my final year at Whitecliffe College, I began working as a singing teacher. I was reaching breaking point in my personal life and all the pillars were starting to fall too fast. I swiftly considered myself retired from art making by the end of 2019. Then Covid arrived. In hindsight, this seemed to be a factory reset of epic proportions for me. I quit my job, started my own teaching business and started working towards finally recording and releasing my own music.

Six years later, here we are. Three singles out. Two more coming.

Stills from a video called Observation Room 137. I was interested in the idea of self-surveillance and escapism. High-key wish I still had those CRT TVs.

Looking back, this time in my life feels like the intricate cosplay of a photographer who actually just wished she’d grown up to become a Spice Girl. At the time, I couldn’t envisage a world where you could make music without needing to become a product. It’s the only version most people see, the top 1% of music makers, so the perception that it’s an all or nothing gig is understandable. The other, more difficult part, was I couldn’t stand to fail at something I loved so much. But something made me persist.

For what it’s worth, I don’t regret art school. There were things I couldn’t grasp the point of at the time; the cut-and-paste journals, the brutal critique sessions, or the endless pontification of essay writing. Institutionalised art practice is a box-ticking exercise out of necessity, but the utility of a ‘visual diary’ has returned to me as something worth investigating again.

I enjoyed this arrangement of the speakers singing to one another. From a work called ‘The car is a good place for a cry or 55 reasons to break up’.

This is a work that was part of a series called ‘Body of Water’. The balloon contained the amount of water you’d need to cry out in order to cry yourself to death.

Without tracking the progress of a work, my brain deletes the process as I go, apart from some very broad references. For someone who thinks about their own brain ad nauseam, I recall suspiciously little of it. Without interrogating the decisions I’m making in my visual and musical expression, I’m regurgitating in a way that feels unsatisfying. At least with a record, I can regurgitate with gusto and receipts. This will be a place to collect and reflect on music, art, weird and wonderful stuff, either in detail or as a vague, visual drive-by. It’s possible the collective five years I’ve spent tracking and recording process has trained me to need this. Chicken and egg type beat.

I like to see other artists talk about their creative process as well, partly because reading about other people being productive gives me a hit of dopamine without the actual ‘doing’ part. Feel free to siphon that from me too. If it helps.

I dabbled very briefly in fashion photography.

Another couple of images from the twin series.

So what’s the point of me telling you all of this? I guess it’s an introduction to an online visual diary of sorts. This entire ramble is a justification for taking up digital space that probably doesn’t need this level of acknowledgement. I don’t see Instagram influencers writing a cover letter for why they’re qualified to sell you a lip balm. And I’m not selling anything here, to be real. It’s the kind of thing that if no one else read it, I’d still get something out of it.

A good friend once said to me, “you like to analyse things to death”. So this is me doing that. Analysing things to death. Or maybe just trying to remember what I like, and how I got here, incase I forget.