Artist Collaboration / 08
In 2023, Indonesian artist Mutia Bunga collaborated with Paul Hodges, an Australian artist with the studio Arts Project Australia, part of the Art et al. X Ketemu project, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Paul Hodges
Paul Hodges is a mid-career artist known for his masterful figurative paintings. A refined draughtsman and exceptional colourist, Hodges preferred medium is painting. He has worked across a variety of mediums throughout his career, including ceramics, wearable art, printmaking, digital drawing and animation. Drawing on references from magazines and books his subject matter is diverse and is inspired by dancers, fashion, pop icons and the romantic Old Masters.
Paul Hodges has been a regular studio artist at Arts Project Australia since 1998 and held his first solo exhibition at Arts Project Australia in 2015. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including, Outsider Art Fair, DUTTON Gallery, New York; Spring 1883, Sydney; Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria 150th Anniversary, NGV, Melbourne; and Pearls of Arts Project Australia: The Stuart Purves Collection, National touring exhibition. He has also curated two exhibitions We could be Heroes, and Movement & Emotion and has worked on a number of collaborative projects presented at Arts Project Australia, including a series of ceramics with Georgina Cue and a series of photographs with The Sisters Hayes.
Mutia Bunga
Mutia Bunga is a female artist from Denpasar, Bali. Currently working and living in Yogyakarta since 2013. She graduated from Fine Arts Education, majoring in Fine Art (painting) at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta in 2020. Since 2013 she has carried out several projects and art activities in Yogyakarta, and several cities in Indonesia.
Mutia Bunga is one of the initiators of TacTic. TacTic is a multidisciplinary art group formed in 2016, that was formed in response to the presence of waste, especially plastic waste and wanting to take action to care about plastic waste in the realm of art. In 2021, Mutia Bunga became one of the facilitators and Community Development Manager for #MarineDebrisRangers program in Tulamben, Bali with Divers Clean Action for one year.
Artwork before the collaboration.
During the first Zoom meeting, Paul and Mutia shared examples of their artwork. They shared an interest in brushstrokes and thought that Mutia’s natured-inspired drawings could be combined with Paul’s figurative work to make something altogether new. From this initial sharing of artworks the ideas of landscape, portrait, brushstrokes, hybrid, science fiction, human/plant and spontaneity were recorded.
Click on each image below for a larger view and caption details.
Process + Connection
From February through May, and across the international time zones of Australia, Indonesia and the United Kingdom, Paul Hodges and Mutia Bunga connected over Zoom. Joined by Art et al.’s co-founder Lisa Slominski, Ketemu Project’s Sidhi Vhisatya, Art Project Australia’s James McDonald, and at times, Jessica Justin Tabah (who designed the Hybridity e-zine), Paul and Mutia shared their artwork and process, deciding on the theme of ‘hybridity’ after several conversations. From here the framework of the collaboration came together with both artists working in their studios to create a series of small drawings to be made into a stop-motion animation embracing hybridity.
Hybridity
Hybridity, in its most essential form, means mixture. For this Peer/Peer Collaboration, creativity drove the formation of otherworldly hybrids. Exuberant forms brimming with figurative and botanical elements formed this body of work, e-zine and final animation. Led by Mutia, she combined her vibrant and ethereal semi-abstracted watercolours with Paul’s figurative drawings, including details of body parts and animals.
This animation contains flashing images and sound.
The images below show the journey of the artworks coming together. The first four are independent drawings by Paul and Mutia including a cat’s head, a body and more abstract botanical shapes. The following four images are digital collages by Mutia where she is testing out the merging of their artworks together. The final four images are stills of the final animation, Hybridity.
Click on each image below for a larger view and caption details.
E-zine
To showcase their collaborative works in multiple formats, Mutia worked with Jessica Justine Tabah to create an e-zine of their creations.
Interview highlights.
What was your experience collaborating on this project?
Paul: Oh, very enjoyable actually. Yeah, it’s very inspiring. It’s been a good process. Yeah, very, it’s a good experience.
Mutia: Oh yeah, first of all, I want to say thank you so much for inviting me for this project and I also want to express my gratitude to the entire team, especially for Art Project Australia, Lisa, Sidhi, James - thank you so much for helping us to arrange and organize the whole process. And to Paul, thank you so much. You were such a cool and great collaborator. I really adore your artworks and I hope you enjoy the result. I hope we can collaborate in another project.
Has this collaboration changed the way you make your artwork?
Paul: Yeah, I like Mutia’s way of working and its inspired me to try different things. Yeah, different techniques and ways to work.
Mutia: Yes, about the whole process… I got mainly inspired by Paul’s artworks and I think this is my new process - to make a collaboration artwork with artists from another country. Yeah, it was really fun and I think I want to collaborate and explore many techniques in my next artworks.
Coming soon! A full video recording of Paul and Mutia sharing their experiences of this collaboration.
This collaboration forms part of the year-long Art et al. X Ketemu project, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Images Copyright: Mutia Hodges, Paul Hodges, Arts Project Australia and Art et al.