T.R. Carter

Born 1984, Griffith, NSW
Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts
Graduation show: 2006
Graduation ceremony: 2007


Artwork in Space YZ

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, 2008
Single channel video with sound
6:24 mins

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is an endurance performance video work made as an homage to love, suffering, death and grief. I made this work two years after graduating from UWS in the downstairs concrete grotto of Serial Space.

My intention in creating this work was to perform a physical manifestation of pain and mourning, numbed by my own drunkenness, through the act of over 200 beer bottles being hurled at me. My legs were cut up and I was pulling shards of glass out of my scalp for a month or so after the performance; a timely distraction from the violence of my grief at that time.

The impetus for the work was an attempt to mirror the trauma and hardship of living with, loving and losing the late Jon Wah, who was a fool for a long billy brown and died a few months before the work was made. The title came from when I first fell in love with Jonathan. I met him at art school and used to catch the Blue Mountains train in the middle of the night to keep him company on his way to work in Katoomba. I was quite demure back then, so on our train rides he used to prompt me to talk to him by asking 'Tell me something I don't know'.

My time studying Fine Arts at UWS was a highly formative stage of my life that celebrated and solidified a community of artists. This time still resonates with me, my arts practice and the way I see the world. It also shaped the ways in which I engage with art and informs my teaching of art. I have collected such compelling and vast memories of this time so will briefly recall a few of the more potent ones:

During one of my first lessons David Cubby asked me to recite the Futurist Manifesto. He then asked me to do it again but much louder. As a young woman from a country town who never quite felt understood, it was hilarious and empowering at once and I realised I was in the perfect place. I also learnt about Mike Parr’s performance Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 (the "Armchop"), 1977 in the same lesson and nothing could excite me more. I later went on to explore prosthetics in my own work, such as my third year final work called FOUL that was later exhibited at PICA. I created FOUL with the technical assistance of Nick Dorer and fell for the viscous and malleable nature of latex.

FOUL (video excerpt), 2006

FOUL (stills), 2006

One of my notable lectures included the time Caleb Kelly cut the lights so it was pitch black in the auditorium. He then played The Dead C as loud as the speakers could handle and then after some silence gloated about his hearing loss due to a particular My Bloody Valentine concert. Being in Caleb’s classes was an initiation into an endless series of sound art experiences I would have at This is Not Art Festival, pelt Gallery, Lan Franchi’s Memorial Discotheque, Hibernian House and impermanent.audio and led into my shared interest with Louise Dibben in supporting sound art at Serial Space.

Terry Hayes and Harry Barnett’s Thinking Strategies lectures challenged us to think, question, manipulate, construct, deconstruct and play with materials, ideas and concepts in new and unexpected ways. I remember Terry as a romantic, a poet and philosopher who was dead serious about art and saw the humour in everything else. Harry wore his sunglasses day and night and after he quit darts, he would get me to light some tobacco every now and then just so he could smell the aroma. They taught me to unthink, rethink, push the boundaries and interrogate the material world, the outer world and the self. There was a strange pleasure watching students drop like flies as the course seemingly got stranger over time. It didn’t seem strange to me though; we were simply taught to observe our thoughts and own them. As I saw it, we were documenting life.

Another significant aspect of art school was the pleasure of watching artworks develop and materialise. I would slump against the outside wall of Z block with my mates, discuss ideas, share cigarettes and we would lend a hand in the construction of projects. Some of the works that I found compelling over the years included the complex and uncomfortable video works by the late Sunniva Hoel Aass, caressing her gapped tooth with her tongue, Kate Brown’s philosophical and dreamy dance under red silk in a drawing class and the hypnotic experience of Hiromi Lim’s installation Proteus, swaying and glistening black tar sliding along bloody oil. I found it so stirring listening to Adam Sussman playing an electric guitar with such loud grit in the computer lab, watching Stephen Fox’s beautifully fragmented appropriation of Hitchcock's The Birds to contemplate the presence of absence and being confronted by the reality of contemporary life and surveillance in Robin Hungerford’s rat experiments and interactive plant installations. The most affective experience for me however, was intensely watching Jon Wah perform in the Bloodied Cunts with bemusement and awe.

Lastly, it was a privilege to have had the generosity, curiosity and energy from David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, Ann Finegan and Raquel Ormella to inform my practice during this time. These people opened my eyes, my mind and my heart to the ethereal, the invisible, the impossible and the real. I learnt how to become a beam of light, that rubbish could be perfume, I learnt to speak candidly, make moving images instead of still life and disentangle the romantic façade of Frank Zappa as ‘tragic creep’. I learnt the power of abjection, fragility, sexuality and femininity, the push and pull of time and that there is no truth, no beginning or end. Mostly I learnt the importance of discourse and having a yarn - no holds barred. Everything had potential, as David would say, with the exception of using animals or children in art, or more specifically, faking one’s own death; a very timely reproach.

You can find out more about T.R. Carter here.