Considering Art Podcast – Agata Mayes, lens-based visual artist

Introduction

0:00Hello, Bob Chaundi here with another Considering Art podcast in which I talk to an artist about their work and something of their life. My guest today is the photographer and visual artist Agata Mays. Agata was born in Poland back in its communist days and lived elsewhere in

0:33Europe before moving to Australia in 2011. It was there, in Melbourne where she now lives and works, that she first took formal training in photography, achieving an advanced diploma in a subject she'd loved since childhood. While doing so, in 2018 she was awarded Victorian Emerging Photographer of the Year by the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers. Agata's practice centres around several interests including psychology, philosophy, science and

1:05computer technologies. She explores themes both personal and universal, mainly using video projection, special effects and sound to create immersive installations. On a recent trip to Melbourne, I visited Agata at her studio. Agata, welcome to the podcast.

Agata's Background

1:23Lovely to meet you. Now, you were born in Poland, born and raised in Poland. What sort of background do you have there? Yeah, I grew up in Poland. I only moved, you know, overseas when I was 23. So, all my child who was pretty much going through a political transition in Poland. When I was born, it was still communism and then when I, you know, when I was very young, everything kind of changed. So, it's quite turbulent time for Poland. But because of that, you've got so many layers and the different things that you can

1:56kind of, you know, recall later on. And do you remember those times well? Yes, I do. The first few years before the revolution and everything that happened in Poland, I was still very, very little. But the times, especially between 1980s, sort of that decade was quite turbulent. So, you could see how the things were changing around you and, you know, a lot of people also move. And you had the right of Solidarność. Yes, that was a big thing in Poland. And, you know, people were divided and there was a lot of,

2:31you know, political disputes and, you know, views upon what was happening at the time. Yes, so that definitely shaped the way I was also educated at school and how the system changed. Now, how did it affect your education? Yes, so when I was very, very young, we were still kind of promoting the left, you know, the Russia. And there was a lot of remembrance that actually had a bad influence on how I felt, because we had to really continuously talk about the past. And it wasn't necessarily the truth

3:03sometimes. And funny enough, when I was about 10, I think, things started to change. So, the book started to be rewritten. Certain things we've been taught suddenly came up as not truth, which is interesting. So, a bit of a Big Brother situation. And for example, the names of the streets changed. Really? Yeah, it was quite dramatic. Even like big monuments were taken down just to show the change of direction. Wow. And what did your parents do?

3:35Well, my parents are mathematicians. Oh, really? Yeah, they're retired now. That also affected how my brain works. So, we're quite analytic, we're quite perfectionists. Also, coming back from the kind of, we call it, Eastern block, I went for quite strict educational system. So, I think that perfectionism and the detail and, you know, going obsessively over every single process is going to stay with me for life. So, unfortunately.

Interest in Photography

4:04And when did you first acquire an interest in photography? I was always very interested in photography because my dad, that was his sort of second life. If you imagine we lived in a post-communistic sort of building, small flats, and my dad had the entire darkroom in a bathroom. So, when it was a day of developing the photographs, we couldn't go to toilet or the bath was full of photographs. So, it was quite interesting and you had to watch it. It was so close that you were picking in and there was a red bulb there and you couldn't just let

4:39light in. So, I was always very, very curious about that. My dad has had an obsession with photography and with film. So, he had a little camera as well and he was following us everywhere with the 16mm camera. So, I think that's how it started. My journey with film actually started during my university years and my first degree wasn't actually in arts. It was in more of a technology than a computer. Yeah, you did informatics, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, informatics. So, yeah, it was... That was obviously the influence of your parents, yeah?

5:11Yes, it was kind of being rebellion and not going to more of an even more mathematical sort of direction. And it was a little bit different because it was more sort of going into economic and, you know, like the other areas of application. So, I was trying to get away with changing direction slightly. But yeah, that was my first degree. In one of your pieces, Fragments is a video installation. You have little snaps of film from your childhood, don't you?

5:42Yeah, this work actually, yeah, it's inspired by my dad's films. And in a gallery, it was actually presented in the same camera that took those films. So, you were looking for the viewer and you could see on the other side of the camera those films. There were snips of my animation in between my dad's little pieces. An interesting thing about that was that you were holding the exact same object that made those films. Right. And you have a kind of video of a rock that looks like it's traveling through space. Is that

6:19symbolic of the passage of time or something? Yeah. I think the rock, if you go back to Jung and, you know, the entire idea of stillness and being always then and the present. Yeah, it's a kind of that thing and traveling time that you've got going back and forward and everything is connected. Almost for this video, when you look at my dad and he's in the mirror of the exact same object that you hold, it's something magical about that, that you connect new with the old. And yeah, the rock is that sort of testament of it.

6:50And it ends with your fingerprints. That's your identity. Yeah. Yeah. If you look around the studio, I've got hands and fingerprints everywhere. So, that's something that is a part of my art and maybe visual language that I use. Yeah. So, Agatha, you then went to, after university, you worked in the aviation sector. What did you do then?

Aviation Career

7:13Oh, that was, it was very interesting because after I graduated from informatics, I realized that I'm actually a free spirit. And the idea of working from nine till five in a dark room and coding, it wasn't something that I could kind of imagine myself doing. So, there was escapism at the time. I started to fly for the very new airline and then I very quickly was promoted to the management position, which was quite high, which was very stressful. And that really, it wasn't what I wanted to do in life. So, I think after many years of very stressful work and

7:46managing 12 outputs at the end, I decided that this is not the way I'm going to go. And I went back to my artistic, creative background and what I really wanted to do. So, even when you were studying informatics and working in the aviation industry, you were on the side, practicing art in some form or other. Totally, totally. And when I was actually working at the end for the aviation, it was one of the London airports, London Luton Airport. I actually met my husband at the time and I was already doing my

8:18first diploma course in photography and the idea was to open my own studio. But that never happened in England. But yeah, I was essentially doing the on the film and a digital photography and film at the time, in my own time, plus studying. So, going back to the aviation industry, you were working at London Luton Airport. Yeah. So, you were based in the UK then, obviously. At the time. So, I studied in Poland. So, I had a base in Gdansk in Poland first, where I was managing on the ground, the flight, so flight crew. But then when I met my husband,

8:53I moved to England and that way I transferred as well with my work. But sometime, you went to Verona in Italy. Yeah, there was actually a European Union program during my first study. So, I spent a year in Verona during my first degree as an internship. So, I worked for the Italian company. And this is actually where I took most of my photographs on a film. So, I had my nice Canon, I remember, at the time, and I was practicing heavily and experimenting with the different films and grains and ice. So,

9:23I remember there was a lot of photographs coming out of it, which probably will come back at some point with my art. So, that was my kind of first journey with that. So, did you start with film photography rather than digital? Well, at the time, that's what was kind of, you know, like when I was younger, that was around and that was the standard. The digital photography only started to come out and also quite expensive at the time as a camera. So, my first two cameras were film cameras. Also, my dad had a few different

9:53things and I knew how to treat it. So, that was a good thing. I wasn't great at the time, but I really enjoyed the process. You were a portrait photographer, weren't you, for a while? There was a moment, yeah, that I actually offered my services as a portrait photographer. And yeah, I did enjoy it to a point, but I think eventually I decided that I want to work, you know, in art and I want to do my own thing.

Move to Australia

10:21Yeah. So, you moved to Australia in 2011. What brought that on? Well, so, when I met my husband, I lived in Poland, he lived in England and we didn't know what to do. None of us wanted to live in the opposite country. So, I promised that I would move to England, but not for long. And we need to figure out, well, we're going to go to more sort of neutral, you know, sort of ground that we move to another country. And we had a choice of few

10:52and eventually decided Australia is the place where we're going to go together. Right. And so, you went to, you studied at the Photographic Studies College in Melbourne. What kind of things did you study? So, I studied photography there, but at the end of my course, actually, again, going the same sort of direction, I kind of moved to video and projection. So, my final work for my graduate exhibition was a projection on a form. And I really, really enjoyed the music

11:23and making the projection 3D. So, it was a mapping around the sculpture. Yeah. Projection mapping. How would you describe that in a sentence or two? It's like designing a video or mapping digital work, which is not obviously permanent. It's just, it's temporary. And overlapping 3D spaces and elements with the video coming out, obviously, from the projection. So, it kind of wraps it around and brings those objects and spaces alive

11:56with the moving video and something. Hmm. Well, let's take one, for example. You did one called Origins in 2019. It's a video installation and you're projecting onto a 10-sided object. Yeah? Yes. And there's so things like raindrops suddenly appear and an eye opening and looking around and strange plant-like things waving in the wind. What made you choose those particular subjects?

12:26It was very much talking about the essence and the origin of, we can call it, universe. But it was very much questioning the Western Eastern sort of cultures and thinking about the consciousness and matter. So, it was really questioning about what was first and trying to think about inner and outer spaces. That particular, obviously, the decohedron symbolized the universe. That's the form. And you start to question those symbolism and how we actually came to be, right? Because it's all really speculative in a way. So, yeah, it was all about the consciousness and working with that.

13:01And you had previously, just the year before, become the Emerging Photographer of the Year in Victoria. That must have been a wonderful achievement. But what did you achieve it with? Yes. So, that was actually still when I studied. Why or how did it happen? We were encouraged through school to submit our work. I was a bit rebelling and I didn't really want to submit to the awards. I said, awards is a bit of a context that I did not understand. And, you know, when you're young

13:32and the rebellion, you say, maybe it's not fair. But I still submit my work. And it was a series of images. I actually picked one from a series called Inside the Mind. And it was actually a digital sort of collage of a figure living in a little box. And it was quite romantic in a way. It was quite, you know, emotional to me. Inside the Mind, it was a stadium of my fear and anxiety. And it was received really, really well. That was a one-off couple. There were a couple more, but that was a main one that got the

14:02most of the highest score. And what was the source of your fear and anxiety?

14:09I'm quite an anxious person. I mean, I'm a perfectionist. I've got my own, you know, sort of quirks. That's your mathematical background. Yeah. I think I am wide, I always say, very thick. So, there's a lot of processes in my mind. And the art helps me to offload that. There are times when I really have to kind of calm my mind. And there's a lot of things going on there. And I find the strategies to do it. But it really, this series was about internal, you know, sort of life that we have and how complex it is.

14:42Do you think that the instability you mentioned in Poland as you grew up, and then changing countries, that all these things probably fed into that, didn't they? I think that I a little bit escaped Poland in the sense that I was, I am a perfectionist. And the system I grew up in, it really was quite demanding. So, I think that Poland as a culture, Polish culture, always wants you to be better. You're never good enough. And I felt that pressure that I always had

15:14on me, the educational system, the way we were always, you know, pushed to do maximum and more affected me a lot. I really find Australia liberating because there's more freedom and life is a little bit more loose. And I feel like you, you can allow yourself to make mistakes where in Poland, I felt it was quite strict and, and hard as well. So, life in general. So, yeah, that definitely that part of my life in Poland affected me the way I, I think, and I, I work.

15:49But through your art, do you think you've achieved a certain amount of self-discovery? Yes, I actually going through the process more and more now. And I think there are times that I really want to shut the door. I know we obviously want to be out there and exhibit all the time, but currently I'm going for an amazing research. It's just the beginning of it, but I'm really working on a, on something bigger than I would like to take into research degree. And it is about

16:19emerging technologies and how we're going to move forward. So, it's about post-humanism and about how the things will change from now on in arts and in life with all the technologies that we've got around. All right. Okay. Well, we'll touch on that again in a moment. I want to take you back to the pandemic. And at the time you described yourself as an artist in crisis.

16:43Yeah, there was a moment that as much as I love digital medium, I really felt like we only existed on screens. I, with my digital art, I very often do the installations and I like spaces and it's about experiencing, physically experiencing it, music and visuals. Going on a screen, I couldn't really figure out how to make people experience it the same way. And yeah, being isolated like that, I find it really difficult. So, there is obviously a work that I put out there where I'm

17:14dissolving one of my portraits slowly. And I wanted people also to slow down a little bit. So, that particular artwork goes for five minutes. And on a screen, sometimes we tend to wait for immediate action, where that's not the way I work. Almost, you need to experience and allow yourself to slow down and not expect this typical, you know, Hollywood sort of action process. Because sometimes you do have to stop and watch the video the way you would just engage with the still, you know, painting.

17:47Yeah. Soon after the pandemic, you did something called The Artist 2021, which was a self-portrait, one eye covered with a camera lens. And you said that it was deliberately damaged. Yeah. So, that was a dissolving portrait. Dissolving portrait. Yeah. It was just damaged by the computer. Yeah. But you did it. And it's interesting that you damaged it. And yet, you're a perfectionist. So, how did you marry that? So, actually, I took my hands off it. So, I just think I overlap a number. I can't remember how

18:23many now, but the processes by the computer. So, I essentially overlap some sort of five minutes process. And there was a number of those processes. And it wasn't actually me doing it, but the computer was doing it slowly. So, I just essentially set it up the way that in the space of five minutes, this portrait needs to be digitally dissolved. And the way it went, it was a little bit unpredictable. And I think that gave me a little bit of freedom. So, I took hands off and didn't control the process entirely. But as a perfectionist, do you think that we seek perfection at a loss, as some would expect?

19:00Should we really be searching for perfection all the time? No, we shouldn't. Absolutely not. But now I'm just going to really make it complicated. I can't be a perfectionist about imperfection. So, in art, there's always a studium and, you know, punctum, and you always look for those unexpected things. And even here, I plan it very, very carefully. Right. Where were your inspirations? I mean, you must have quite a lot of cultural heritage

Cultural Influences

19:33back in Poland. Does that still influence you? It does. I think very early on, when we were talking still during my first study here in Australia, so second, sorry, photography, I was very inspired by post-war paintings. And I can still find in my early work some icons and some paintings from the church because we, you know, Poland is very, very religious, very Catholic. So, I remember for hours staring at the sittings and the paintings in the church. And I didn't even realise till during the

20:08study we had an exercise called Red Thread, where you had to literally go through all your life and took out all the pieces and trying to understand what you're about. And one of them was the way my figures were positioned. And that was interesting because I moved away from church a little. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm spiritual, but I don't attend the church now here in Australia. But still, if you look at my early work, you can see those typical body language and the positions that I

20:39remember from the religious paintings. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. And film, does that influence you? Oh, yes. I mean, I love cinema, especially the European cinema. I also, I don't know if you look at my recent work, it comes probably a little bit more. I always wanted to be a pianist. So, there's this unfulfilled dream. So, there is a lot of Polish films with the classical music that I really, really enjoy. And there's, for example, Kieślowski, Three Colors, or Zbigniew Price,

21:10now obviously created music for all those films. Double Life of Veronik as well. So, there's a lot of European cinemas that, again, we're going back to the same sort of construction that they are very slow, but they are very, it's full of symbols and signs in it. And you can really kind of read them in a different way than typical movie. A lot of your installations are set to music too, aren't they? I think you collaborate with Polish composers. Yes. I've got one that I really like collaborating with. It's Anna Dobrytska. In the early work,

21:47Masetti, she changed the name. Yeah. And that's excellent. I absolutely love it because she is, again, creating those soundscapes, we call it, looking at my visuals. So, how we worked on a couple of works, I would create my entire visual, you know, entire projection. I would record it in my studio, send it to her, where he was in Italy for a period of time, now in Poland. And she would literally look at it and play and improvise to it. And she's so excellent that she would do it in a

22:20first or second go and it was perfect. Like she really connected with what I was saying and it just worked very, very well. So, we worked for a number of, yep, she helped me with a number of installations. You say that you are a frustrated pianist. One of your pieces called Compositions that you did a couple of years ago is a series of clasped hands, I would say, doubled up. What's the connection with the piano? So, yes. So, the entire exhibition that I created was disassembling parts of the piano and projecting

22:55inside of the piano. So, showing the soul, the heart of the instrument. But yeah, there was a series of a large format photographs that are my hands. And it's very much connected to the composing and composition. And when I was six, I actually wanted to be a pianist. And I went and asked in one of the Polish music, very reputable schools, and it took them a few seconds to look at my hands and say that I'm never going to be a pianist. Oh, what a shame. So, I decided to express that part of my, you know, creative life differently, visually. And I

23:32created composition with my not so perfect hands. And that was beside of those other pieces and complemented the exhibition. Now, as we sit here, on my left, there is a part of a baby grand piano, isn't it? It's like, it's got the innards of a piano with the keys and the hammers, or whatever you call them, stripped away from the body of, you know, the wood. And you've projected images on it,

24:04haven't you, in your piece called Architecture of Inner Space. Just describe what that's about. Yes. So, I actually took those keys, a keyboard outside of the piano. And what I've done, I hanged it before you entered the room. But when you were in a dark room, the piano was actually waking up slowly. And I actually projected the keys on the piano. It took a while for people to understand that the keys are actually not real. So, the piano started to play for projection.

24:36And the idea of the piano was just to show these two sides of the instrument. One, the mechanics, how heavy it is, how mechanical, like a clock. It works perfectly. It's got so many little bits and, you know, wooden elements inside. But then once it wakes up and starts playing the music, it's so incredible, you know, sentimental dimension to it. So, what happened? There you go through pieces of piano that are very mechanical. It's this kind of mathematical brain of mine. And then

25:12you go inside and experience the piano that slowly wakes up and not only shows you the sound, but also visuals and films from my childhood inside the piano. Themes from your childhood. Again, you're looking at your inner landscape. Yes. Inner space, my memories. So, I do love working with memories. Not maybe in a sense of preservation, but recalling. So, bringing it back and how they actually evolve, how they change and how we actually recall those moments from the past and how they change us.

25:44And so, you're really looking at self-identity. Very much so. Yeah. I think my entire work, when you look at my fingerprints, my eye, parts of the body, almost like a marks, you know, like when you go and think about Asian times in those marks, those little evidence of someone's existence, this is what I'm doing for the next generation. So, I just want to leave a mark, something behind about me and who I was. And your installation finishes with a fireball exploding.

26:17Yeah. What does that signify? I think this is just going through an instrument slowly, obviously waking up and going through all these emotional states and all those memories. And at the end, there is a core. Almost you think about the universe having a heart in the best at the end, it goes back to the beginning. So, almost like going back to the origin. Okay. And goes into small little pieces like we will,

26:48and our consciousness will stay there as a part of the universe. So, everything is a part of everything. So, we become one. And that's how I would describe it.

27:00You are interested, obviously, in psychology. Your first series called Inside the Mind explores the sensation of the unexplained, right? You talked about your perfectionism being imperfect. So, let's, if you're explaining the unexplained to me, what do you mean by it? The truth is, whatever happens in our mind is not reality. I mean, you could question, and that's another philosophical big term, like big, big, big dispute about what's real,

27:34what's not. Okay. So, a lot of what happens to us, it really happens inside of the dark space on our head. Okay. Do we really know that the table is a table? How do we know that it's hard? Whatever is outside, it's really air, just neurons and connections and a little electric sort of transfer between some sort of part of the nervous system. But it really, what happens inside, it's what we project, what we are about. So, it's really working. At the time, it was working with my fears and

28:06sensations that I could not explain. Okay. So, I looked through certain lanes to the world. There perhaps wasn't what other people would see. And a lot of this was happening internally. I was trying to understand it. So, some of my work, when you look around, even the whole here, it connects to Jung and Freud. At the time I read Freud, I really tried to understand that. So, one of my works actually has got the words of Freud book on it. And I couldn't understand it. I was going in circles, trying to understand what's happening with me. And I think this body of work

28:42is evidence of that search in something that wasn't tangible. I couldn't explain 100%. And you did that too with The Essence, didn't you? Where you had a series of inkjet photo prints. Yes. Encouraging the idea of reality beyond scientific proof. Exactly. I think that was the next step. There was just that the essence was right after that thinking, you know what? We've got those two approaches. One, that it's a Western science and says, this is the proof of that. But no one ever questioned the fact that Big Bang is just an

29:17assumption. A lot of those things, there's always one assumption in a Western science. Nothing's really certain. And then I started to look beyond that thinking, right, nothing is certain. You know, my scientific mind can't explain everything. So why don't we look into other things that are not as easy to explain? And I started to question existence of three moons, that they are in many cultures and actually has been proved by Polish, one of the Polish scientists that they exist. Or why do we read hands? And, you know, we still kind of go with it, but when it comes like reading palms,

29:52where it actually comes from, and I started to think about if Freud was actually right. So that's why one of my photographs includes the pattern of the book that I read and felt like maybe that was his paradigm. Maybe that was what was happening in his sort of inner world. And that gave me a little bit of relief and not always scientifically prove everything and trying to be a little bit open to unexpected, unexplained. Do you hope that the people viewing your video installations

30:27are resonating or referencing their own emotions? Is that what you're trying to do, really? I think that's what happens, no matter what I, you know, if I'm trying to do it or not. I think you need to allow the viewer to experience it in their own ways. And especially with inside the mind, I was very, it was very early on in my sort of development, that one, a lot of people were coming back to me and they resonated on their own level and with their own experience. They very

30:57often came to me when they were exhibited and were talking about these stories behind and how they connect to it. And it was wonderful because sometimes it was something completely different than I experienced. And I think art is there for that to experience. Technology is obviously important. Are you pleased or worried about AI? I'm not worried or pleased. I mean, again, if you think about all the work I've done, I got to a state that is indifferent to me. Like I only refer to it as this. I can't do anything

31:32about what's going to happen, how it's going to change. I think that we have to be very careful with it. And I do think the life is going to change drastically, but I can't do anything about it. So... No, but can you use it to enhance your installations? Oh, totally. I think the goal with AI is, I don't really understand why would you use AI to replace your creative process? I mean, I completely don't understand that. As a concept of art, I think people make art for other people. The only sense for me to make art for AI, so AI

32:11does it if it does it for another AI figures. Like I don't really understand how that experience or that transfer of emotion coming from something that is robotic can please human beings. So I think this is where we're talking more philosophically in the future, how society is going to look, where the people will be on one side, it will be like kind of post-humanism when we're going to have robots. That's the only way I would explain it. But in the process, I don't really use it. I use it as a concept. So I do think about making art to demonstrate what it is, what's happening to us,

32:48what that AI is going to become. But that's more being a content rather than a process. Agatha, thanks so much for talking about your work. Your mind is ranging over so many subjects,

Conclusion

32:59so it's fascinating to listen to. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Agatha May is there, Perfecting Unexplained Imperfection, or something like that. I hope you enjoyed listening to Agatha. Join me, Bob Chaundee, for another artist next week. Agatha May is there, Perfecting Unexplained Imperfection, or something like that. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it.