Artist Phoebe Paradise on Brisbane’s bizarre past, and how the city inspires her work

Welcome to CityChats, where Brisbane Times meets our city’s most interesting characters on our most iconic form of transport. This week, visual artist and director of Merivale Studios Phoebe Paradise tells us about making Brisbane-centric artwork, getting involved in Brisbane Writers Festival, and her thoughts on the Brisbane 2032 emblem.

We meet Paradise at the Orleigh Park ferry terminal on a very hot Brisbane day – so hot she immediately pulls sunscreen out of her bag and hands it to Dominique to put on her bare shoulders.

Your artwork is very, very Brisbane. When you started making art, what were you drawn to? Was it also very Brisbane in hindsight?

I think my artwork had always been Brisbane, but I hadn’t known it. I think I’d always been really interested in sort of punk subculture. I’ve been playing in bands for most of my life, but my interpretation of that illustration style was always accidentally coming from a very Queensland lens because I hadn’t travelled much when I was a kid.

I hadn’t been anywhere else. And so outside of what I’d seen in books and movies and TV and art, my world was very small. That’s changed a lot over the years.

I’ve travelled a lot now and I’ve seen a lot of the world, but I still come back to that lens. Maybe it has grown and developed over the years. It was kind of accidental, it wasn’t a conscious choice.

Didn’t you start out making punk band posters?

I did. Of varying degrees of quality. Please don’t look them up.

I was more interested in music than I was in visual art when I was really young. I wanted to be a singer. And when I went to Melbourne, I hadn’t yet started really playing in bands, but I wanted to be involved in that scene.

So the way I wanted to be useful and establish myself in that world was by making posters and that kind of thing. When I came back to Brisbane, that was when I started really making a go of doing illustrations for bands.

What kind of clients do you work for now?

It’s changed over the years. I do a lot of commercial work, but a lot of the work that I do now is for institutions like galleries, museums, libraries.

All the corporate clients I do work for now, I can’t tell anyone about. So it’s not really exciting. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m doing this really awesome project. You probably won’t know about it for about four years.” But that’s a good problem to have.

All the artists that I really love and admire are people who have diversified their practice a lot. These are people who are making merch, they’re doing commercial work, but they also have a very, very strong conceptual practice as well, where they’re able to do exhibitions and installations.

I want to be like them, basically.

How has your experience been in the Brisbane art scene and watching it change?

In my mind, the central thesis of Brisbane for the last 50 years has been: yes, we’re not like the biggest cities, we don’t have the big museums, we don’t have the big institutions.

Obviously, that’s changed now, but the thesis was that we could afford the big house with the big backyard, and that’s where the culture would happen in this city. That’s where the punk shows would happen – under the cavity of the Queenslander. The sharehouses would have art shows.

Of course, nobody can afford a big house with the big backyard in Brisbane any more. So that emerging art scene has had to move outwards into art studios or commercial spaces.

And I think likewise, to exist and survive as an artist, you need to have a commercial practice or a city job – that’s the way it goes.

Do you wish that was different?

Absolutely. If you’re asking me whether I wish I could afford a house, the answer is yes my friend, absolutely.

I think it would be great to have more support for arts businesses and studios like mine. Of course I would love that. But I also think it would be great if there were more commercial opportunities for artists as well.

The arts industry in Australia relies on funding rounds and all of this stuff, and I think it would be great if there was just a bit more work out there, too.

You got involved in Brisbane Writers Festival last year. Are you back again this year?

Basically, I consider my relationship with the Brisbane Writers Festival like a hostage situation. Jackie Ryan is the most incredible author, artist, and also curator of this fantastic festival. And I am just lucky enough that she wants me to come back to do the artwork.

If I can do it every year, I would be a happy, happy woman. But obviously, it would be nice for other people to get an opportunity. So we’ll see what happens next year.

Most of the work that I do are larger projects that are over multiple months or years, so when I get to do a sort of smaller, more standard illustration commission like doing work for a festival or merch for a gallery, that’s really fun.

Unfortunately, the more successful you become as an artist, the less art you actually end up making. Much of the time it’s like clocking in at the shapes and colours factory at the studio to supposedly make art for a living, but most of the time I’m just doing phone calls and meetings and that kind of thing.

It’s far less glamorous than I think people like to think. It’s a lot more of a boring fake email job.

Paradise hosted two in-conversations at the Writers Festival – with Heartstopper author Alice Oseman and Australianarama author Stavroula Adameitis, aka Frida Las Vegas.

How did you prepare for your in-conversations?

Adameitis challenged me to introduce her to some specific Brisbane kitsch history, and I shall be delivering [our chat preceded her conversation with Adameitis last Sunday]. I entered my mind palace. I walked into the library. I pulled off the big dusty tome from the library shelf. I blew off the dust, and out came the Warana Festival.

I’ve got what I like to call the Stefan Cinematic Universe. There was a restaurant that has a very short, but very beloved, history called Popovs in Indooroopilly Shoppingtown. It was in the 1970s and it was a Russian clown-themed restaurant at the top of Indro.

Technically, there’s no crime against it. But it sends a chill down your spine looking at this thing. I swear to God, it’s an absolute f—ing nightmare.

If you click through the Instagram post above you can see the images of Popovs, but personally, we’re having nightmares about it, so you’ve been warned.

As an artist, what are your thoughts on the Brisbane 2032 emblem?

I love the 2032 emblem. I think they did a phenomenal job, but I think what people don’t understand is it’s an insurmountable task to create an emblem for a city like Brisbane that doesn’t have a very well-defined edge of its visual identity.

To create an emblem for a place that isn’t a city of monuments, you could have something that represents the beautiful Maiwar River. You could have something that represents the natural environment, but we don’t have an Opera House. I love the Story Bridge, but it’s no Opera House.

I think they did a perfect job by choosing something that we do have a very specific relationship with here, which is that intangible, esoteric quality. For a lot of people, what reminds them of home is the sound, right? It’s the sound of the birds, and I think, specifically, the cockatoos.

But really, the cockatoo could represent any of the aural texture of Brisbane when you wake up at 4am. The oppressive noise coming from the lorikeets, the magpies, the cockatoos, all of them, it sounds like home to me.

So when I saw that emblem, but also the colour scheme – all of it – I’m like, “yeah, to me, that makes a lot of sense”. I think they did a great job.

I would love to be able to contribute work ahead of the 2032 Olympics, but I think all artists in Brisbane, we want to be able to contribute to the story of this city.

As an artist, you’re telling your own story, but you’re also a documentarian as much as anything else, where you’re incidentally documenting the time that you live in, and the work that you’re creating represents the place that you’re in as well. So, being able to tell a story about Brisbane, it’s my life’s work.

I think now that the emblem is out, everyone will be turning to the opening ceremony.

You know what was great about the Sydney Olympics? It was gay, dude. It was so beautiful. It was queer joy. It was camp. It was Kylie Minogue. It was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It was fabulous. And I think we need to take a little bit of that energy and bring it to Queensland as well.

I think there’s so much in Brisbane’s visual identity that can be captured without trying to homogenise it or turn it necessarily into a Queensland story more broadly. Queensland is an insurmountable beast to capture in one image. And the idea that we could try and synthesise that identity into a single thing is impossible.

That being said, I would love to see a giant Queenslander incorporated somehow.

If we can get at the opening ceremony a house on stilts like traipsing its way through, I’ll die happy. That’s all I have to say.

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