I caught up with Nick to talk about his inspirations and what goes in to making one of his sculptures.

When did you first start getting into art?

I guess when I started I was exposed to a lot of art because my cousin is an artist. Every Christmas I would hear about all his art adventures and it sounded great. I’ve always been interested in it. My favourite teachers at school were art teachers and they inspired me to move into making art. Now I’m studying it at uni and I absolutely love it and it’s all I want to do.

So you grew up with lots of creative people in your life

Yeah and that has definitely played a role. I have noticed that sometimes the works are quite similar, like I use similar materials to my cousin.

When you first started making art what did you focus on?

We had a lot of tasks in school where we had a lot of painting and drawing and I never liked that. I could never do it, I never got it right, it just made me really frustrated. I would always nag my teacher to do like a sculpture of something like that. So I would usually do that, or something with clay.

What’s your process in creating an artwork?

Well it depends. Sometimes I ‘ll walk down the street and see something on the ground and I’ll pick it up if I find it interesting and a lot of the time they just pop in my head- like eureka moments.

When was your last eureka moment?

One day when I was walking to uni I remember I had to think of a work, I couldn’t think of something for ages and ages. Then I saw a smashed light globe and I thought why don’t I put a light bulb into ice and let the ice melt from the inside out. It’s weird. I’m not trying to sound like a wanker or saying it’s mystical or anything….

That’s how it works for a lot of people in creative fields

I guess the opposite is when I watch TV; I get a lot of ideas from watching documentaries, like materials. I will watch a show and they will use something in the show then I’ll go out and find that material and then incorporate it into a work my own way.

The materials that you use in your works seem to be quite an important part of the artwork

Once I have the idea in my head I have a very set image of what I want it to look like. What I love about sculpture is that it’s physical, it’s in your hands. That’s why I like using different materials because they have so much meaning inside of them instead of something like painting, you know, everyone uses paint. And it doesn’t really have a meaning. With materials it’s endless, you can get so much meaning out of the simplest things.

Do you ever have problems with the practicalities of making the artwork? Some of them would take quite a bit of handy work

That’s sometimes hard but that’s the fun of it too, it makes it exciting and different. I try and stick with what’s in my head but it always seems to veer off in one direction. It’s a lot more exciting when you are making it because anything can happen, as it builds up it could fall to bits, but when it does that it could create something just as good if not better. You can’t be too settled on what you want to do, but you also can’t be too critical.

A lot of you work is time based, how did you come round to that?

A lot of the time based ones are to do with the environment, which is something I feel very strongly about. The environment, climate change and all that. I want to display the temperance of our planet and how fragile it is. I want to show how delicate the environment is, and that we could lose it all.

What’s an example of a work like that?

Well like the light bulb one I told you about, that was about melting glaciers. Like Mount Kilimanjaro has absolutely no ice left on it and that happened in thirty years through a change of just one or two degrees.

Do you think that art has the power to have any influence on subjects like that?

Yeah I do, but I think it is a lot different to facts as such. We always have facts but we want to visualize them. Science is more detached, it’s not emotive and art can do what facts can’t, it’s more based in emotion, which turns it into something that people can relate to.

Who or what inspires you?

Barbra Hepworth mainly because of her interest in form. The way she was able to manipulate form and create such simple objects that have such meaning and depth behind them, which I struggle to do. It is hard to create something that is so simple, but with so much meaning behind it. I do get a lot of influence from watching documentaries. It’s a weird way of getting ideas. Because it’s on a TV it’s not really there, and it is a subjective view.

What do you think of art in Australia?

In Australia art is slowly progressing, in Europe the level of interest is so much more! People just go to art galleries all the time; it’s a social thing. Instead of just being a portrait of some person on a wall, contemporary art is more fun and makes people think. I think if people start to realize that art is talking about important relevant issues and that sort of thing that it will become more popular in Australia. But there definitely needs to be more government support for artists in our country.

Thanks for having a chat Nick. I’ll be at one of your exhibitions soon.

Below are some examples of Nicks work.

Meltdown

Due to rising CO2 gasses in our atmosphere, the earths temperature is rising having detrimental affects on many parts of the worlds wildlife. This is most noticeable in ice caps around the world, as many have shrunk too less then 60% of what they were 100 years ago. This work illustrates to the audience the detrimental affects or lifestyles are having on the earths ice caps. The light inside the ice block heats up quickly, slowly melting the ice from the inside out, creating a pool of water inside, eventually seeping out, illustrating the impending rise in the Earths ocean levels.

Static Stair

Energy is the fuel of almost all humans existence, and without it we would be unable to perform our most basic needs. But to produce this energy, we require massive amounts of materials which result in large emissions and damage to our surrounding environment. A balance is required between human use and the resilience of our climate and wildlife, which I encourage in this work, through the use of balancing the heavy plaster on the fragile light globe.

Being together, in any way you wish to interpret it, with your friends, family, lover or community is better. Whilst being alone is important for personal development, we find ourselves becoming increasingly disconnected from society, bordering on apathetic. It’s important for us to learn to be together again.

Not having many years of age under my belt, it is difficult for me to comment on what it was like ‘back in the day’, however it is noticeable that society, in general is becoming insular. Someone says hello to you in the street and you run a mile because you think they are a paedophile. Neighbours are not given a little understanding, and they certainly don’t become your friends; you’re more likely to leave an abusive note on their windscreen than have them over for tea, and don’t get me started on the height of rudeness amongst people on public transport. The verdict is in: People care less and less about one another.

The recent London Riots have highlighted the dismal attitude that many, particularly the youth have towards society and their community. Whilst the rioters may have been working together to loot and destroy whole London suburbs, it’s generally considered a feeling of isolation from society at large and a dissatisfaction with the government that sparked the riots in the first place. Rioting of course, is not a new phenomenon. People have been rioting for hundreds of years to demonstrate their unhappiness, usually because of the government or those in authority. Of all the images we have seen of the riots the most poignant of them all would have to be the callous mugging of Malaysian student, Ashraf Haziq, who thought he was being helped by a group of youths, only to later realise he was being mugged by them. It unfortunately encapsulates the attitudes and lack of moral compass of all those people involved in the riots. While for days it felt like whole communities were destroying each other, it was nice to see the concept of togetherness still existed in the form of groups of Londoners who bandied together with their brooms and rubber gloves to help clean up the mess caused by the riots and to show a sign of solidarity.

Whilst the London riots were so much about the youth, the recent phone hacking scandal that brought News Corporation to its knees also highlight society’s top tier’s disregard of togetherness. A newspaper hacking the voicemail of a murdered girl certainly does not celebrate or respect society. If we lived in a society that cared about each other, rather than making money at the expense of each other, we wouldn’t be dealing with situations such as these. It’s becoming harder and harder to be a member of this global community and accept that practices and behaviour of recent events is an OK way for society to conduct itself. Perhaps we have spent so long now on our own we no longer know how to behave with each other?

Social media is a fantastic way of keeping in touch with your friends, not just your nearest and dearest though, your old school friends, your fourth cousin, and some random you bonded over a taco with one late Saturday night. Whilst social media like Facebook means you can keep in touch with people at any time, it also deters you from actual verbal communication. When you become used to texting, writing on walls and and chatting, it’s sometimes hard to forget how to have an actual conversation. In person. With someone.

While the world has become closer in terms of globalisation, we’ve never been further apart. Society needs to realise it’s better being together. It’s better learning about our differences than fighting each other because we don’t understand them. It’s better to tell someone you like what they’ve said rather than clicking an icon. It’s a hard pill to swallow when we realise that usually it takes a natural disaster or some horrific tragedy to bring communities together. Don’t get me wrong, there are countless of people and community initiatives out there who are taking on this notion of community spirit themselves and are trying improve their world, but there is also many of us, in some way, lack compassion and understanding for their community and society. Surely we should constantly be engaging in some from of togetherness with our communities? I’m not suggesting we all stand on mountain tops holding hands and singing, all I’m saying is that we should participate a little bit more in each other’s lives, no matter how small the gesture. As the saying goes, those that play together, stay together. So, who wants to play?

A healthy media industry is vital for a healthy democracy; it provides the information from which we form our opinions on how the country is run. Perhaps it is my growing older, (theoretically) wiser and definitely more cynical but I think the state of our media industry is far from adequate. I seem to have trouble distinguishing the difference between MX, Sydney Morning Herald and The Telegraph and headlines like ‘Pilot, stewardess sacked over cockpit sex‘ and ‘Former swimsuit model turns rodeo rider ‘, it’s not hard to see why. Media reporting like this should not become the norm, although sometimes it seems it already has.

Every adult in this country has to vote, and if they are taking headlines like that to the ballot box then what is the point? People should be able to pick up the paper and have access to simple, factual, information about politics, not what politicians had for breakfast, what they do in their evenings or anything to do with their private life. I’m all for being a voyeur but leave it to trashy reality TV shows not politics. You should not have to be some media studies student or journalist to be able to sift through the crap out there and figure out details about policies, government and how our country is being run. It is the media’s job to tell us this information, but paradoxically it is getting harder and harder to find mainstream media that provides this.

The lack of interest in politics from young people cannot simply be blamed on poor media reportage. With Tony Abbott’s childlike stubbornness and Julia Gillard coming across more like a character from Kath and Kim than a politician, it’s not hard to see why young people have become increasingly apathetic. These politicians have become so caricatured they’re not even really human enough to hate. They embody that repetitive, irritating quality of a neighbour’s dog that won’t shut up- you never really hate the dog you just become adept at blocking it out, much like young people with politics.

I am a person that is interested in politics, sure I am not going and volunteering at my party of choice but I feel like I have a responsibility to know what’s going on. Lately, keeping up to date with politics has become so painful if you asked me what I would prefer to do out of watching Q&A and repeatedly bashing my head against a brick wall I wouldn’t be able to answer you.

Australian politicians have gotten lazy. As the late, great David Foster Wallace explained in his article about the 2000 McCain trail, American politicians ‘cannot afford to have the politics get ugly and negative and have voters get so bored and cynical and disgusted with the whole thing that they don’t even bother to vote’. Unlike America, in Australia it is compulsory to vote, thus Gillard and Abbott don’t have to worry about this. They have treated their relationship with voters like someone who has gotten too safe and lazy in their relationship with their boyfriend/girlfriend, they whine too much, don’t write back to texts, don’t answer questions properly, stop being ‘nice’ and in extremely ugly scenarios go to the toilet with the door open. Yes politics has gotten ugly and negative and we are bored and cynical.

When we see politicians on our televisions there is an overwhelming lack of interest and a deep disengagement that is often a defence against pain, against bashing your head against a brick wall, again and again and again. Seeing topics that we care about, like climate change, refugees, interest rates or the GFC, repeatedly pummelled with words by politicians who we don’t care about is beyond irritation. It’s down right painful, to the point that it seems masochistic to even try and engage with these issues. Current Australian politics is a breeding ground for cynicism, bitterness and a wholly anti-democratic sentiment, which is scary. I want to care, I really do but when I pick up the paper and I read about Kristina Keneally’s hair extensions, an article by Andrew Bolt or spend an hour needling myself with frustration while watching Q&A, it seems silly not to shrug in apathy.

It can be fun to look back at the likes of Churchill and Keating who were not only commanding, but downright hilarious (they were also assholes but who isn’t? Right?). They were not hilarious in the way that modern politicians are. Now we laugh at politicians, it’s a kind of gallows humour that stems from the political landscape being about as appealing and funny as a detention centre. Sure I know it’s easy to be nostalgic for the past and ignore the negatives but here is a classic Keating insult that definitely wouldn’t go astray today, “Hi Jim, Paul Keating here, just because you swallowed a f***ing dictionary when you were about fifteen doesn’t give you the right to pour a bucket of s*** over the rest of us.” I told you they were going to the toilet with the door open.

But what would happen if Gillard or Abbott let loose a Keating style slur today? More than likely it would be a media frenzy. News reports would label one sexist or elitist or any other ‘ist’ that makes a good headline. Within a day there would be hundreds of articles on the web debating the said slur, followed by groups springing up on facebook, then the politicians would go on talk shows defending whatever they said while audiences are back to the usual head-bashing-wall routine not to mention the extreme left/right wing trolling that would appear on comment boards. Maybe I am exaggerating, but the fact is that in our modern twenty-four hour news cycle, this wouldn’t be that uncommon. So can we really blame politicians for being so boring and vacuous when this is the kind of hyperbolic response that can blow up around them? It is the old chicken or the egg question. Have politicians been forced into vapid repetition in response to a gossip style twenty-four hour news cycle or is the media catering to political campaigns based on negativity and repetition? There is no simple answer, media and politics will always be intertwined and forever problematic, the real question here is whether we care about these problems. As the media churns out articles, Gillard repeats the word sustainable and Abbott yells liar, there is a nagging voice in the back of our minds that asks, why do you care at all?

We arrive, and he’s wearing glaring aqua-marine shirt, which I can’t help but think was chosen to relate to the subject he is so passionate about (the earth, and conserving it’s energy). Like his clothes, his talk is lively and to the point- he wastes no time beginning to discuss solar energy, wind energy, and energy in Australia.

He begins by mentioning the oil predicted to run out in 2030, a date that suddenly seems incredibly near. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine a life without oil (and electricity)- no phones, cars or refrigerators, but it is even harder to imagine some sort alternative- having grown up in a society so dependent on fossil fuels, so much a part of our culture.

For this reason, he starts by talking about solar panels- something smaller, before we get into the heavy stuff. Most of Australia sees solar panels as expensive- much more so than electricity. But in Australia- where solar energy in abundant- and government rebates mean that they cost only $7000 to buy and install- the payback time is pretty short (3-4 years). The more people use solar panels, the cheaper they become (and they will only become cheaper over time) meaning that this could be one way to solve our energy problem.

From here, he begins to talk about renewable energy on a far larger scale- larger than I, or the audience, have ever considered before. He largely talks about the study of ‘Zero Carbon Australia’- which is a plan for Australia to be 100% renewable within ten years. The plan rejects nuclear energy (it would take at least 10 years to even install), and concentrates on energy that is already commercially available: solar, wind and hydroelectric.

Basically, an area the size of Canberra, covered with solar panels, or other forms of generators, could supply enough energy for the whole of Australia. The cost would be $370 billion (4% of our Gross Domestic Product)- but save 1.6 trillion in energy costs by 2040. It would also create 80 000 jobs and place Australia as the ‘world leader’ in energy- a power shift similar to America’s after being the first country to reach the moon The huge amount of land space in Australia makes it one of the only countries that would be able to carry out such a plan- as well as our high sun and wind rates.

It’s obvious to everyone that the issue of energy for not only Australia, but the world, is only going to become larger. I would suggest looking at the ‘Zero Carbon Australia’ site, as well as looking into solar panels for your house. After all it’s our generation who are going to have to solve this inevitable issue, and the earlier we begin the better.

Teen bullied to death, but not in vain

I’d say if you live in Sydney you’ve probably heard about it, but this news has reached the whole of Australia. The death of 16-year-old Daani Sanders last week, who committed suicide after being tormented online, is one that has reached the whole of Australia, and sparked national interest and debate – especially amongst youth.

Daani, who attended Crestwood High NSW, was bullied online (on Facebook), mostly via gossip pages- such as ‘Hills Gossip’. When memorial pages (such as ‘R.I.P Daani Sanders. 19.07.11), were created after her death, these were also to become areas for ‘trollers’ (online users who ‘troll’ for extreme responses from others, by upsetting or angering them) to post and gain attention. One such post stated “deserved it. I lol’d hard”. Those who had created the pages, as well as friends and family expressed their hurt- saying “This poor girl took her own life and all people have to say is horrible comments”. Another page states “Hills Goss you are the one that killed Daani Sanders”.

Lifeline worker, John Brogden, has called the death “a tragic wakeup call”- and it seems that Australia’s youth is not ignoring it. ‘The String Movement’- a group aiming to ‘disarm bullying’-saying ‘This is the 21st Century’, was formed last week. It began with ‘wear string around your wrist day’, as memorial to Daani Sanders, but quickly became something bigger.

Thousands of teenagers have used social networking such as Facebook and Tumblr in order to post photos of themselves supporting the movement- wearing rope, string, or ribbon. Many have made videos, or created websites- showing how the very thing that caused so much pain can also be utilised for good. The simple act of wearing string has become a symbol to show that you’re not okay with bulling.

And in a time when 3 out of 5 students are bullied in our country (27 times an NRL Grand Final Crowd!), it has never been more important for something to be done by teenagers of Australia themselves. Hopefully Daani Sanders’ death can be seen as the tragic wake up call it is, and the epidemic of bullying that exists can end in our time.

The String Movement http://www.facebook.com/thestringmovement
Lifeline 13 11 14

While some groups will cry invasion of privacy, others will point out the dangers of paedophiles grooming minors online. Parents may be much more adept at identifying this sort of behaviour than their children and South Australian Attorney-General John Rau pointed out the need for some form of online regulation.

He affirmed if the world all of us live in day-to-day requires rules to stop people doing things which are harmful or dangerous to other people then it stands to reason that the virtual world needs some form of policing.

But how far is too far? How is a child defined today? Acquiring one’s own email, social networking account and learning the ways of the internet are almost a rite of passage to today’s youth and is for many a daily ritual akin to hygiene and eating. In 2009, the Children’s Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities survey reported that 79% of children aged 5-14 years old used the internet and of this, an estimated 3% ( approximately 72 000 children) were reported to have had some kind of personal safety or security problem during their internet use.

Perhaps primary schools should be more actively involved in educating minors about the dangers of the internet. Many minors do not realise that there is no permanent delete button when it comes to posting on the internet. So this begs the question: should parents be given access to their children’s Facebook account? Go-to, faithful Vibewire contributors! What’s your opinion? Get your creative juices flowing and give us your take on this controversial issue.

The organic food industry is growing, I have seen it, you have seen it, we have all seen it and more than likely we have eaten it. But the question remains, why? And what does it all mean? The term ‘organic’ means that food is grown without synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizers, genetic modification, irradiation, industrial solvents, or chemical food additives. Basically it’s the normal, tried and tested way of doing things – seeds go in the ground and plant growth ensues, but many people seem to forget or realize this. Organic food is not grown in some sort of miracle soil and watered with the tears of Jesus Christ to bring you a high nutritional value tomato. It is a normal piece of food, that you, I, or anyone with a patch of dirt could grow. And we have been growing it, for thousands of years. Only in the 20th century did we start adding various chemical concoctions to the mix. Most scientific evidence shows there is not much difference in the makeup or taste of chemically grown food, however, chemicals have been responsible for a myriad of serious environmental problems. So even if you find all the preachy hippy stuff hard to handle, you have to admit, beneath the dreadlocks, patchouli oil, and wheat grass shots, they have a point.

But is caring for the environment the real reason that we have tuned back to older methods of farming? The way the general populace has responded to other environmental problems suggests otherwise (hint: global warming). Sure there is a percentage of people who genuinely care about the environment, people for whom the impending death of the planet is more then an abstraction. But then there are people who buy organic for novelty of it, people who watch MasterChef the night before then go to Coles and buy the first green packet they see, people who buy it to give them that warm fuzzy feeling inside that western people like to achieve through tokenistic gestures like buying recycled toilet paper or cute cards from Oxfam (see: McDonald’s takeaway cups for cute environmental frog or tuna cans that say ‘save the dolphins!’). Perhaps more than any of the above, the organic movement has hit a cultural nerve, it has become our response to being alienated from the products we consume. Don’t worry, I’m not going to delve too deep into the murky waters of Marxist theory. Even though he is old, beardy, Russian and very much dead, Marx’s Theory of Alienation still resonates with problems in our society today.

We seem to be stuck in a stalemate, a paradox that cannot exist. We are trying desperately to reconnect with what we consume, we want organic, home grown, slow roasted, home-style, we want all this but we want it now, and lots of it. The only way to provide all this with the speed and quantity that our capitalist appetite demands is to industrialize the production. So home-style cookies are baked in factories or better yet, you can by them from Betty Crocker, organic vegetables are not in your back yard or community gardens but vast expansive and industrialized farms, with factories, processing and packaging. So have we made the old new again? Where does this leave us? It seems we just as alienated from the products as we have always been but now they are a just shade of green. But hey, at the end of the day I would prefer a shade of green over a shade of grey, and if we don’t start considering the impact of our actions, the environment will be as grey as Marx’s beard.

While such virtual declarations are generally met with an impressive downpour of ‘likes’, kisses and exclamation marks, in me they never fail to incite a fairly consistent reaction – a ‘what the?’

Generation Y it would seem is a strange beast, and one that’s laden with contradictions. If the zeitgeist is to believed, we are the most childish and evasive generation of all time. Indeed in August 2010, the New York Times almost declared a state of emergency, running a huge ten-page epic titled “What is it about 20-somethings?” Writer Robin Morantz-Henig, adamant that there has been a shift in the mind-set of young people today, wrote that the traditional cycle of completing one’s education, starting a career, finding a partner and having children has “gone off course”. Instead she reckons that today’s under-30 ratbags are characterised by fleeting, frivolous romantic entanglements, returning to university due to a “lack of better options, ” temporary employment, and a voracious appetite for travel, all of which reflects a deep fear of commitment and a reluctance to join the enticing world of “adult life”.

While all this Gen Y-bashing seems to fit snugly into the tradition of chastising young people for no apparent reason, a fair chunk of evidence lends weight to its sociological reality. In the 1970s, those terrifying times when most of our parents were courting each other in between episodes of The Goodies, the median age for first-time marriage was 21 for women and 23 for men. As of 2009 itsoared to 29 for women and 31 for men. That’s an eight-year leap within just a few decades. Not bad, huh?

Popular discourse describes this as a ‘taking ages to grow up’ phenomenon, or ‘adultescence’, ‘extended adolescence’ and the kinder ‘emerging adulthood’. All of these terms essentially refer to young, middle to upper-class adults in western countries like Australia, the UK and the US, who are too busy exploring their identity, having new experiences and sleeping around to attend to mundane tasks such as marriage, procreation and career development.

So why is all this solely a Gen-Y thing? Weren’t some older generations also a bit disoriented during their twenties? Probably. But the difference is that now, we have the freedom to be. My mother, for example, tied the knot at 21 and had a child a couple of years later – not because she wanted to, but it’s because it’s what you did as a young woman in the seventies. Forty years on, we don’t really have to get married. We don’t have to have children. Theoretically, we can do or be whatever we want. All this choice though comes with a downside. As 20-somethings we are excited by the possibility that lies before us and terrified by the anxiety that accompanies the responsibility for writing our own destinies.

So what’s with all these facebook engagements? Perhaps this throwback to the good ol’ days is a response to the level of anxiety brought on by an excess of choice that young people face today. Getting hitched in your early twenties definitely puts all the identity exploration and general floating around to a halt. But perhaps amid all the haze of being young, marriage and kids offer something that many people may indeed be craving: a sense of commitment. Stability. Certainty. Indeed in 2011, marriage and kids come with a sort of retro charm. By doing it early, the anxiety choice dissipates. Maybe that explains why, despite all the options laid out before us, so many of us are choosing to go domestic at the same age our folks did.

It’s a trade-off, that’s for sure. As for me, I’m doing what feels right. Rather than seeing all this possibility as an oppressive force, I’m embracing it with open arms. Is it scary being 24? Yes. Do I sometimes feel anxious? Of course. But as the enigmatic loner Friedreich Nietzsche once observed, “no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”