Zali Morgan: Cole, this exhibition marks the end of your residency at Goolugatup. How has the residency shaped your thinking and practice?
Cole Baxter: I think being in that space and having the surroundings and idea of an exhibition space and being near a gallery and just sort of having yarns with people and just like a space to relax as well and kind of really sit with very random artistic ideas made me wonder. Made me just want to more participate with painting and different materials still ultimately telling, you know, a story that's meaningful to me.
But I think there was a big bandwidth of freedom to explore, find things that I like, find things that I enjoyed, find things that were completely new and different.
ZM: As you've just said, you explored and incorporated new mediums throughout your residency, which has led to these being an outcome within the exhibition. Can you speak to more to what drew you to experiment with these different mediums, and if it shifted your process or thinking about your practice?
CB: I think I've got lofty ambitions to be accepted into the art world so that I can do more exhibitions, fine art exhibitions, fine art photography exhibitions, in these institutions that are established and respected and accepted as, you know, the sort of the gates or where the gatekeepers are, you, like I think we've discussed, like, the AGWAs, like the NGVs, the NGAs, all their mob, you, all the abbreviations and initialisms. So, I felt like, well, I think I can do a lot with photography, but maybe it's sometimes limits me in terms of audience. And then maybe it also limits how I can, like, describe something, and not necessarily always in a bad way, sometimes it limits me to be, like, "Well, I'll get really good at describing this, but I just really figured that there's so much art that's non photographic, that I really like. And there's a core or an essence to it that I like, and it's in a non-photographic realm, but there's overlap to how I see the world or how I believe I could share, how I interpret the world. I think it would be cool to experiment, and I think I just felt as well that an artist residency intrinsically should be to look within, work on yourself, push new boundaries, fail, hopefully upwards, but potentially just be vulnerable and put yourself in a precision to just straight up fail. Which, to me, isn't like a naughty word because if I put myself out there, that's cool and then if people dig it or don't dig it, they're both just like, different, you know, choose your own ending sort of things, you know, go a different chapter. So I think as someone who is very critical of, like, other people's part, there's something that feels like if I'm gonna allow myself to do that, then I need to contribute to that same space by putting myself in that line of fire. potentially to be a line of potentially could be praise, which is obviously really desirable, but, yeah, I just felt like there was a certain element of vulnerability that I had to allow myself to give in to potentially grow positively.
ZM: Yeah, yeah. Wow. It sounds like a really good phase of your practice to be in just to be able to accept that sort of criticism and growth through failure. So, protest, identity and legacy are central to this body of work. What does it mean to bring these ideas into a gallery space?
CB: You know, it's interesting, in a way, it feels a bit clunky. Like trying to put a square through a cylindrical hole. Gallery spaces, they're very institutional. The art world upholds art and different views, but it's done so still with a set of rules, and I guess, you know, protesting, rallies, are just having objections to the status quo. But then there's also this sort of feeling of, like, it's kind of too glossy. It's not meant to be in this space. It feels like conforming, it feels like you’re sort of relenting to a certain element of assimilation.
I like to, in a controlled space, challenge people and make them feel uncomfortable. I think maybe that's the coolest thing about it because, by virtue of putting the ideas of challenging oneself, challenging a system, challenging a set of systems, in the gallery space exhibition art world, it's kind of like consensual uncomfortability. People know the gist. I'm going into an art gallery, there might be some graphic imagery, there might be some things that don't align with me. There might be some things that challenged me in a way that [that feels] uncomfortable But I think it's a nice, also safe space where there's almost implicit consent. I do really back myself as well, although I'm a very sensitive person, I do really back myself, my art and photography, because so much of it belongs to community and things that transcend me.
ZM: Was there any work or any key messages throughout your exhibition that were really meaningful for you to engage with, or that there was a highlight for you?
CB: One of the works that I created as a part of the residency, and was an idea I'd had for a while, and the creation of it was so simplistic, but I felt like sometimes the most powerful and best said things are done so through the means of being very simple. And that was the colour swatch work that I did with “Blak” written all over it. It’s called A Third Blak, A Third Blak, A Third Blak, and then, in the lead up to this [exhibition], [it was shown as a part of] the Kalamunda Art Awards. I'm looking forward to displaying that in the exhibition through the residency because, I got a little bit of a nod from the Kalamunda Art Prize mob. It's a non-photo and the first non-photo work of mine to win an award and the smallest, by far.
ZM: I remember seeing it in your studio, and I felt like that was a really well resolved work of yours as well as time I saw it, yeah.
CB: I always like to encourage people to be very honest with me because I know how it can be difficult sometimes be like, "Oh, this thing doesn't suck too much." And you gave me the perfect amount of feedback through an honest supportive lens. I do kind of feel like it's the sort of watershed moment or flagship, if you will, work for the exhibition, which is the sculpture that I'm working on. That I just feel like [the sculpture] punctuates so many things that people already know me for. It's a new medium. I really like the idea. It pushes strongly what I've been talking about, that I'm trying something new, I'm underlining that the aesthetic quality of it is there but is not the most pressing element of it. It is still just the storytelling. It's very un-glossy, the work. And I think by design, hopefully that'll still really push the messaging and the storytelling. And I think it's a big swing, if I miss, it's sort of what I was talking about earlier. It's putting myself in a vulnerable position for people to be like, "This fucking sucks." Go back to doing the other shit. That sucks, too, but it sucks less than that. Do you know what I mean? Like, no one's gonna fucking talk like that, but they might, and that's, like, something that if you sort of open yourself up to, you know, the fools probably feel more painful, but if you stick the landing, it feels even better. I don't even think it is going to make me be like, "I'm a sculptor".
I think it's just, like, something new, different and challenging and it punctuates and tethers all these other things of protest, Noongar Blak resilience, talking about ”contemporary issues” such as colonisation, medals, trophies, what do we do with them? There’s that centralised white perception: "Oh, this is a very new thought, to cancel the recent past” instead of “there’s, for the dominant culture on this land, a centralised narrative [that] we haven't liked this the whole time”. So I’m presenting that in a realistic, representative way of us, and it's cool because I think it'll make people feel uncomfortable and challenged, but those aren't the people that I'm concerned with being culturally safe towards. I think it's safe towards an Aboriginal audience and hopefully challenging in a positive way, but if not, I feel very comfortable in challenging, hopefully, a wider audience.
