PM: Well let's begin by talking about the journey and how it began. So, how did you start on the career path of a painter and printmaker?

YB: Well, it began when I was in high school, in Port Pirie. An art teacher singled me out a bit and gave me a lot of backup and encouragement and said I should apply to the South Australian School of Art to be accepted there.

And I did, and I got in and I was one of the youngest people to be accepted, and I received a scholarship. And my parents thought it was wonderful and I thought it was great. So, I started there. I did my four years in South Australia.

I studied printmaking because it offered the most subjects. I then finished there and worked for a few years as an artist and then did a year at RMIT doing sculpture and just moved from Melbourne on to Sydney and just where I am now.

PM: By now you've developed a very distinctive and highly personal style of your own. Just where did these images come from?

B: When I look back at my work, I can see little indications of what I'm doing now, in the beginnings of my work. I never really knew, I never really know where they come from but it's always to do with my immediate environment.

I don't imagine things, I work directly from sketches which I make of my environment, wherever I am. That's why I like to move around and change my environment. I make the sketches and then I put them away and then I bring them out and simplify them and make them into watercolours and then look at them and change them and then make them into paintings.

So they directly come from the environment that I'm in and they have a sort of a history. I am interested in the same sort of images through all the twenty years I've been working, buildings in the environment, the urban environment, people and animals in that environment.

PM: Are you able to say why those particular things, like buildings and animals and people. Are you able to why those things interest you in particular?

YB: It's because that's where I live. Because I've never lived in the country. I come from Glasgow, I lived in the city there and I've lived in urban areas. I've never really lived in the country and I respond to what I see. I can't make up or, if I go into the country I'm overwhelmed. I find it too much. So I prefer what I know.

PM: It seems to me that much of your work results from a sense of displacement. You've just mentioned how you came to Australia from Glasgow. What role do you think displacement plays in your work?

YB: I think it's crucial in my work. I think all my work comes from this feeling of displacement or a feeling of not belonging. I feel I don't belong anywhere. So, I continually move around trying to find the place where I fit. I never find it.

I think it began when I came to Australia when I was ten. I came by sea and I had this wonderful voyage of four weeks where I was neither place, neither Scotland or Australia. But when I arrived it was like a shock that I didn't fit in this place and I'd left behind and could never return to where I came from because our family were very definite in saying they'd never go back and this was it, we had to accept it.

And I think whenever I travel now I still have that feeling, a repeat of that feeling, of here I am I may never go back and this must be my new place. This is what I have to accept and understand. So I try to make sense of it. And I like finding myself in an unusual place or a different place that I don't understand at all because I am forced to make new pathways to understand it.

PM: So it's like those famous lines by the American poet, I forget which one, I a stranger and alone in a world I never made. I mean, is that right? Is it a sense of trying to make sense of a world which always seems unfamiliar?

YB: Yeah, that's why I really like it when I'm in a country where I really don't understand the language. And even more when I don't understand the written language, where it just becomes symbols and makes no sense at all.

When I am in Paris, I can understand the written language but when I am in Korea, I see the text and it becomes this magical symbol that I've no meaning attached to. And it becomes like drawings and that really is very exciting, seeing buses driving by covered in drawings.

And just being in an area where I've got no understanding and having to forge new pathways of understanding.

PM: So this strangenessis not something that, in a sense, frightens you it actually excites you and you enjoy it

YB: It does. It pulls me out of what I think I get in to a lulled state if I stay too long in Australia where I know everything. I think I know everything. I only know a certain strata of it but it's a bit comfortable. I like the uncomfortable.

PM: So, tell me a little bit about your sojourn in Paris, the one from '92 and 95' because it's quite a long time. What impact did that period in Paris have on your work?

YB: I think it was very important because I had, I went back to Paris with a fifteen month old child. And having a child had made me focus and organise and realise how important my work was to me.

How important my child was but also how important my work was and how I had to make time and really focus on what I wanted to do and wanted to say. So I had good childcare and I really worked very hard in the hours that I had free.

And I looked around in my environment and took what I could from it. And because I lived in a small space, I was forced to work very small but I worked in large quantity - small but large quantity.

And with that quantity I was able to pull out the best of what I was doing and then focus on that and then pull out the best and focus on that. So I was eliminating and refining within in a certain parameter of hours and of dimension.

And I think it really focussed my work, something that before I had a child I could just sort of free range and there were no limitations. But then I had the limitations and I worked with them.

PM: let's perhaps move onto Tokyo because you said that to some extent Paris was familiar but Tokyo was much less familiar much more alien an environment. You were, you went to Tokyo when, in 1997-98, you had the Australian Council studio there. It seems to have had a huge influence on you. So, what form did you think this influence took on your work?

YB: Well, when I was in Tokyo it was incredibly isolating. I was in small apartment in a block which was filled with Japanese people who I couldn't speak to or communicate with. There were no contacts or any structures set up for the artist in residence. You were left on your own.

I had a contact with Nobuo Yamagichi at Maki Gallery, so I had, I did visit his gallery and he took me to other galleries and we talked a lot about Japanese contemporary art. I just spent so much time working and working and long hours cause I was on my own so I could work all night if I felt like it.

And I did a lot of small prints and a lot of drawings, hundreds of small drawings. I papered all the walls of the appartment with my drawings and prints. And then I would lie down and look at them and pick out the ones that I thought were worth taking further.

But they were all about what I did during the day. I'd go around for half the day in a subway or walking and then I'd go back and just draw or make small prints. And it was like an enormous amount of information became refined down to a few pieces which then became paintings when I came back to Australia.

But it was the having so many hours to work and having such an intense environment and going around on the subway, underground, and not seeing what was above me. And being aware of Hiroshige's Hundred Views of Tokyo, or Edo, and I thought I want to do a hundred views of Tokyo subway cause I'm not seeing above I'm seeing underneath.

So I did do that as well as my drawings. So it was bringing a lot of information and bringing it down to a very simple form with the time.

PM: Do you ever work outside the studio, do you ever, or only in the studio?

YB: No. I work, I do sketches outside. I'm always sketching. I'm, have, that's my beginning is always a sketchbook or a photograph but very rarely a photo, usually a sketchbook. But I go back to the studio and then take it through stages, those sketches.

PM: It seems to me that a lot of your work results from some sense of displacement. Would you like to talk a little bit about the role of displacement in your work?

YB: Previously I've got the feeling of displacement by moving out of Australia or moving to Australia. I never imagined I could feel, experience displacement within Australia and when I first went to Lockhart I didn't think that would happen.

I went there out of curiosity and I'd met some of the community, some of the young artists who were working up there. So I thought I'd go up and help them with their printmaking cause they asked if I could help setting up an etching, sort of, class.

So when I arrived in Lockhart, it was the biggest shock that I ever had of displ, just being in somewhere that is so surreal and so different that it has affected me. That was in '97.

That I have been working on the theme of Lockhart since then until now because of the power of the displacement that I felt when I arrived there.

PM: Well, after Tokyo, Korea and Seoul in particular, seems to also had a big impact on your work. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

YB: I first went to Korea in 1993. Nobuo Yamagichi, the Director of Maki Gallery, invited me to join in an exhibition there with other international artists. So that was my first experience. I was there for a week and we were taken on a tour of Seoul and the Korean countryside.

And I just thought it was such a wonderful place I wanted to come back. And then I saw Asialink studios advertised and their first studio in Korea. So I applied and I got the studio in Korea.

So I took that studio up in '95 and spent four months in Seoul and Chong ju in the country. And I worked with one of the Korean artists there and he showed me the traditional way of working on Korean paper and that really changed my work and made my work more bold in colour and shape.

And I spent three months in Seoul on my own, working in print workshops and drawing and just absorbing Korea. And I have been back twenty times since.

PM: So that influences partly the cultural difference, I suppose, but also you seem to be suggesting too the different techniques and materials have fed in.

YB: Yeah and I found in Korea that , I really, even though there was a displacement because of the language and the text that they use and the whole culture. But I actually felt a familiarity that I haven't felt in any other country, a comfortableness.

That's why I go back so often and I've made some good friends there and I get a lot of work, I get a lot of work out of the environment by seeing it and being there. It's one of the places I felt most comfortable is Korea.

Credits

Interviewer: Dr. Paul McGillick

Camera, light & sound: Matthew Temple

Video editing: Dr. Bob Jansen

Technical & assembly: Dr. Bob Jansen