 I'm Tony Oates, the curator of exhibitions here at the Drill Hall Gallery at the Australian National University and I'm sitting in the exhibition Propeller today with the artist Ham Darik. Ham is a camera-based artist who grew up in Sydney and moved to Canberra to study sculpture in the mid to late 1990s and you've travelled all over the world, but it's interesting that you've come back to Canberra for this survey exhibition. You've been here a little while and what we see in this exhibition is kind of a development from predominantly sculptural practice into more recent interest into paintings and trying to translate a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. Can you tell me a bit about your starting point at the ANU Sculpture School and how that influenced you and where it led and how you've stepped across a divide of sorts, if that's the right word. I was at the sculpture department and I'd come from Sydney, a TAFE course with some very formal sculptors, Jan King and Paul Hotmire and Jim Croke and I went down to here where there was a real sort of mix between a formal way of making art and a more investigative post-modern way of looking and making art so when I arrived here in 1995 that was the vibe in the sculpture department so there was performance work, lots of ephemeral work clashing against really formal sculpture carvings and welded steel and so I really enjoyed that discussion back in the 90s and it certainly balanced my way of thinking about making art in some way, you could make it quite formal or you could attack that or you could go the reverse. The school at that point in time, the sculpture workshop was quite dynamic and led by David Watt and you know he kind of was pushing it in multiple directions which kind of opened a space where you could make any work that you wanted to and have it within the context of a sculptural practice and develop your own, hopefully to begin to develop your own voice within that. Easy for some, not easy for others and of course you know things change as far as modes of making go but I found that I was always interested in a pictorial depth and relief carving was where I began that journey and historically I was always interested in investigating how you could use objects to discuss that and that resonated through my work from there and this show I agree looks at me pushing into a more pictorial space where I'm using tools to make paintings rather than sometimes they break free of that completely and other times there's an echo back in to those tools. Yeah I mean there's an interesting one of the kind of key shifts in sculpture in the modern idiom was this idea of drawing in space and so artists were trying to use a three-dimensional form to replicate the ideas of a drawing and I think what we see in your exhibition is the opposite or coming back out of sculpture into making paintings so you're moving from a three-dimensional form into a two-dimensionality which is quite surprising and the main way that you've been doing that is meditating on an object but using color as a spatial entity and there's a whole series of paintings in this exhibition that meditate on a bowl form in which the color is so heavily charged with some oppositional forms or they're mixed and set up against each other that we start to see an echo or a resonance expand outside of the color. Can you talk about how you set up those dynamics using just color and negative space? Yes so one of the ways that I build a painting and an image with this present form that I'm working in is to set the color against the white now that could be through a small reference to a bowl as we're talking about the bowl series of paintings here I saw a tiny little bowl and the light hit the edge of that bowl and its scale in my mind suddenly enlarged and it was because that rim that edge activated and created an unstable unsettling image that I could then work with and then of course the color is really quite robustly set against that so the bowl series for like orbit series was a strong way of looking at an object but also setting up a battle within the way you looked at the object and that dynamism makes it interesting for me so that leads into the wall paintings as well the white is set against the color there's usually a color that's heavily manipulated a blue that starts as a red so you have a simultaneous agitation of color within that color itself and then that's set against the red to make larger shapes. Yeah there's like a known phenomenon of setting two colors against each other and when you do so two bold colors you get the complementary becoming present in the opposite color but once you put a white gap between those two things there's an exciting energy that is like reflected between the gap and it kind of ignites and I feel that as a physical thing you know so you know the object has a resonance in itself and then I feel that like if I can push that into a painting and set those colors against the white that it really creates a deeper pictorial depth than most paintings you know that are dealing with a fully painted no white and then working back with a little bit of white later maybe to highlight something I put the white in first and then you know work towards I think there's some classic examples of the the mantis works and wink are kind of the the key proponents of that model in those works you're sort of thinking of the saw form but then using a white to separate two colors yeah there's a great dynamic that occurs in wink where the saw blades close in on one another other whereas in the mantis works they seem to open up and expand in space the two two new works are mantis they're just from last year is that correct yes that's right they're new works last year and unlike wink wink has its own sort of optical movement that I really pushed and I did that in two ways the first way was to separate the blades and use the angles but the second way was to remix the color again differently so one side of the painting is quite heavily you know painted with a sort of dark red and a dark golden yellow and then rather than just saying I'm going to add white I mix those colors again with another color in it so suddenly your eye does pick up on those things and it becomes activated in two ways the later the later paintings mantis one and two that are in this show the colors what I've tried to do there is make the colors bounce out into the white space so you see an echo a flashing bra so the movement is a flash rather than a visual optical and it makes another color for me I see you know like a pinky color and a also a sort of another lighter yellow but yeah so it's still using the white but slightly differently and you know that all of those paintings and all the paintings in the show in fact they reference an object that might have once been a sculpture in some way so I always see those those wink and mantis referring to the saw and knowing that you've got saws and tools you know they give you access to make a painting those objects and I guess with the wall painting that's sitting behind us counter attack the tool that you have chosen that in other instances you've used to make an artwork of and presented as a physical artwork the tool is extended across a two-dimensional plane and acts in a totally different way can you talk about the process of how you use a tool a cubit on the wall painting and and what how that limits your actions but how it enhances your action as well yeah it's it's set up a really it's a pictorial challenge in a way because these wall paintings initially come from me making a painting on an object my grandfather's box ruler which folds out and I put a geometric pattern very carefully painted a geometric pattern of triangles on that ruler and then I thought one day what if I use this ruler to make a painting now that I've altered it and so I treated it as a beam compass of sorts you know and held one end and traced the other end and then kept what I thought would be a simple way to do it to one color even though that color was manipulated it was a blue that had red in it and then just gradients so that object you know triggered that way of making what paintings directly on the wall for me and it was integral you know but it was a really exciting jump yeah it's quite an interesting it's not the way a painter might approach making a painter if if you might don't mind me saying so because it's still tied to a physical object that's found and I think that's quite that's quite an interesting trajectory that we see in the work is that the object becomes a mechanism to open up to become something that it's not and become a painting and what's very interesting about this painting is that you're also referencing a series of renaissance paintings can you talk about the relationship and where that comes from so of course the counterattack is there's a scaffolding in counterattack to make a painting this big I really wanted to have a discussion have some deeper thinking about a way of making painting and the renaissance is a good way to start because you're talking about pictorial depth and that huge jump that they made considering space but I didn't literally want to paint that so I thought if I used that method which has now become a cubit which is from the tip of my finger to the tip of my elbow that fan shape in there is drawn from that and so they come from three triptych called the battle of San Romano which is Paolo Uccello and one's in the National Gallery London which I've seen quite a bit from having lived and worked in London a bit and the other two are in the Uffizi and the Louvre I've also had a look they much changed paintings colour-wise they were very silver but what hasn't changed in them is the joyous kind of investigation of objects and spaces and I thought that why not use my proportions now to explore that in a painterly way so you know I scaled them to my scale you know so up from there so if I had two arms reaches that was you know four cubits so I then began to investigate the space and discovered more about this way of making painting in the process it's ephemeral of course it's going to get painted over so yeah I think that that's quite an interesting concept because in many of the sculptural works you're kind of rescuing an object from impending doom pulling things out of the Thames or pulling out basketball nets from you know the impending death but here you're making a work that will be erased very soon and there's a there's an interesting contrast between its impermanence and the sort the solidity of those those sculptural forms the time that you made this work it took about five and a half six weeks to complete we were in some sort of environmental crisis do you just put that out of your head when you're making it or are you really found it difficult to put it out of my head it was the most challenging work to make because you know as an artist often you are you know close to your emotions you may not display that and not all artists are that way but I found that really challenging because I was investigating a very human thought making a painting a very historical way of recalling something and adding a history to something and also I knew it was ephemeral so I had to begin to make a structure that I could enjoy and inhabit and I found ways to do that in this painting so what did you learn about Lachelle's painting in painting it that you might not have already understood is there something that came out of that process I think he was very interested in signals within his painting you know constructing a fallen lance or a series of lances to and really looking at the object but also within that he was very creative in his structuring of geometric shapes that broke free of that like there's flags in those paintings that you could just take the flag and have a look at that geometric pattern that he's made and it would be just as interesting so I and he's used as a very literal example of learning how to make a signal in a painting in a composition but I think spatially he created all these really large rhomboids large triangles in his work that go across the three paintings and suddenly they haven't been exhibited in a row in fact I think he was from Vasari it desires to only show them on three different walls but I put them in a row and made connections across that and the other thing I really found fascinating about using his drawing his his compositional drawings was pushing things like the lances long lines and repetitive long lines and I wanted to push the colour behind some of those otherwise I'm stuck on the same plane so I had these kind of pictorial dilemmas to solve within it and that was really challenging but in places I think it was really rewarding it's quite interesting how pronounced those rhomboids actually become in your obstruction of that painting so the way that they project out and you know you're making shapes with colour but then you're really making shapes with the negative space at the same time and you know we've talked a bit about the sonic quality of of space and the echoes that occur in this construction we see greens blues grays pinks shifting across and bouncing off each other but we also see those negative forms the rhomboids and the triangles projecting towards us so in terms of a spatial kind of conceit how do you use negative space to develop those things well I think it's quite evident in we just saw the time lapse of me making it the other day and you know that's on you can see that on the drillhole site it's like a seesaw I kind of hang something in the middle and then I go either side and I keep doing that and that's me drawing it with a with kind of the colour and then drawing it with the absence of colour and I'm balancing that as I go all the way but I found that that there's a certain period of time when there's enough paint on the wall where both have to work together and and hopefully the viewer can find those those spaces and enjoy that aspect well there's another work that you've made specifically for this show I see red which is in the gallery two that is a premise that we've talked around a bit I guess today again coming out of Goethe's experiences of colour can you talk about how that has evolved into something much bigger than a gouache on a piece of paper and how you kind of consider making something for a room yeah that was a series of gouaches that I made and started you know really in 2011 there's a blue and green gouache in gallery three that's quite it's called night's edge and the the dark colour looks initially it looks black but the closer you get it's green and I was really interested in Goethe's colour studies and his surrounding colour with the dark or creating a gap with the light which is what he does a lot to to find out which colours lean towards each other from the colour spectrum you know so you've got your blues at one end and you've got your reds at the other and you have a volume of both to work with in in ic red room and both of those colours though start as red so I then bulk up the colour until it becomes a dark green or a dark or a blue and they both have their weights and there's a discussion between the weights there with with that and that's that works become more and more sort of dynamic in in that I've found that within that process there's other references for me that I've been sort of processing and working towards making for years you know and some of them are as simple as you know looking at a Sydney Nolan there's a painting that that's called quilting that the armour where the blue void of the sky is being stitched inside the helmet you know and it's like a reflection it's a reflection yeah yeah and so in in in ic red that blue is spatial as well more so initially than the the dark green but then the dark green sort of creeps up on you because within it you do pick up a harmony of red I'm sure yeah I guess you bring up an interesting point like a lot of your work is historically engaged with artists that you're interested in or artists who've made great leaps forward I mean I see like the Delane's quite regularly in some of your works there's obviously like Tatlons as well we talked about them before but Matisse I see in several things but you're very engaged with the past and you're a keen observer you get to travel quite a bit to see things so you're quite fortunate in that regard but that engagement with the the past obviously feeds into a lot of your your work currently yeah it's it's certainly inquiry and it it sometimes percolates up in ways that I don't expect it to I mean I see Frank Stella in a lot of these more recent mantis things there's a lot of like reference to his action or to you know the opening up and the the systems of making a painting yeah and I mean they're they're all I suppose it's two things it's my kind of memory and the way I use my knowledge of of a painting or a series of works that I've enjoyed and then my actual ability to physically make something just with a you know simple tool so paint brush and paint you know all of these works are just hand painted you know I'm very much about that yeah no there's certainly you can certainly the tactility of the hand in a lot of these works is what activates them as well like so you know photograph they may appear crisp and clean and there is an element of that but there's a lot of nuance to the surface particularly in these bowl paintings yeah where the the color isn't applied with exact precision it's it's all there and the nuance of the hand actually helps to activate the surface the lines aren't perfectly straight the circles aren't exact but you know the body the human body it's interesting you stay frank Frank Stella in that way you know he's so integral into like getting the big brush and painting those black and whites and and you know if it's 120th out it's better you know than something because your your your eye picks that up and you engage with it I think it creates a nicer distance to look at something yeah I'm very lucky is also I have traveled a lot and seen a lot of art you know and worked for you know very well-known artist for some time now and no doubt that stuff rubs off on you but you in a way it's been good for me to go the other way rather than have become a painter's painter straight away you know I've been able to free myself of a lot of pressure I think by thinking about objects and and and space and time because underpinning you know this work it's ephemeral the other works are on the edge of being lost completely the shovel heads have been pulled out of the Thames they're half falling to bits and I've given them a new life and a new discussion so certainly that's that goes both ways that historical knowledge I think you know I'm willing to let some of it go and I'm willing to you know take on yeah so there is quite a lot of knowledge like we've got the work moon boy in the back gallery there as well you obviously had a bit of a thing with knowledge well an ongoing kind of relationship with his works that that work in particular kind of speaks quite strongly of like this sort of dynamic between abstraction and the figurative and you've kind of captured both the human head and an idea of abstraction of the setting sun at the same time yeah that certainly Nolan was an influence when I lived in London I was thinking about some paintings and of his and when I came back a lot of a lot of that came out but it was more also about thinking about an icon and not necessarily having him as an icon but saying what are you actually doing in your paintings that's making you this kind of thing is it the colour and then you know humour's important in my work too you know so you know he you know he's quite people know Nolan and they can be quite serious about him but I kind of like that looseness not to say that he's always serious because I don't think he was but moon boy you know as soon as I saw that shovel head it was the referencing that painting you know it maybe it was just so much of an extension to the figure it's got a neck it's got its head and I just put the disc in the middle so it was kind of a little jab but it was also a nod as well you know can do both and sun trap with the rabbit traps the first work I made of rabbit traps references and not it's called diversion you've seen it that references his painting called hair in a trap right and there's a rabbit in the it's in the archery in New South Wales there's a rabbit trapped in a rabbit trap with its foot but its eyes are blue and there his father's eyes so you know people not initially get that but then you know you find your way into a painting and so that work diversion had red and blue on the plates of the traps so they were kind of almost kinetic with the geometric movement backwards and forwards but they were prized open as well so they had a bit of bite you know visually well sun trap's kind of very similar in terms that the color both activates the the trap but also makes you forget the trap is a is another object there's a there's a reversal of of its of its purpose or its purpose still stays with us but you recontextualize that and that's that comes through in all the sculptures really yeah and importantly that sun trap became a sphere and a body itself so the walls painted it's integral to have that wall behind it a deep indigo blue and it allows it to just activate the yellow that's underneath it so there's this dynamism that's happening with the colors as well as the brutality of the of the traps being turned into something less brutal you know pictorial discussion a discussion about you know planetary bodies or something like avoid as well well that work reminds me a bit of Howard Taylor and I know you've been fascinated with his work as well and you actually have a couple of small Howard tailors at your house that fascinatingly resemble a table tennis they do yeah which is really curious and I didn't have them when I started painting on table tennis bats which is curious the first series of bats was 2001 and they were portraits and that was called great white blokes and carved into those bats were you know the great white blokes of Australia at the time very a very political series of work called rally you know so we had you know Kerry Packer you know John Howard lots of politicians Alan Jones you know it was a direct pun on the rally of life and then I thought well these I left them for a little while a year or two and then I went back and started painting on them and carving into them so and then I when I when Howard Taylor's arrived they were so personal you know they were this size the same as a bat they weren't and their markets for sculptures that he made that were much bigger so we're talking about scale straight away you know so I felt completely you know positive about you know the way I was working certainly as an artist that's a good thing doesn't happen all the time but you know if I'm painting on a table tennis bat it could be a bit of a a pun or a loose thing but actually you know what it's it's it's a vehicle to allow people to look at your work that may not it's but it's certainly an entry like it's even it for yourself it's an entry or it's a bridge between the sculptural form and the paintings and like the flatness of the surface of the of the bats kind of stands in for the flatness of the canvas and you're allowed to then develop space within both of them and their mementos as well in a way the dance which is after Matisse even though it doesn't have the figures directly in it there it's reduced to a geometric shape anyone who knows the Matisse work they pick it up straight away so like it's it's it's evident straight away without the figures it's quite the color helps and it's such an amazing painting you know and I remember seeing it the first time and you know feeling really small and learning a lot from it you know so it's um but those bats were you know out in the flea market in Paris you know and they had to be an echo of of their of what I'd just seen so that's often a way I work so that that little moment of engagement with an object can be more greatly investigated