Hello Lamb

The Perspectives of Elsewhere

In May this year the Hello Lamb collective travelled to Tokyo to present The Do It Yourself Shelf Museum Of Possibilities as part of GEISAI Museum 2, an 'emerging artists art fair' produced by Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki studios. Part of the incentive in going all the way to Tokyo for this one-day art fair was to sow the seeds of cultural exchange: to meet like-minded Japanese artists and collectives, and with Michelle Armistead on board as curator, to bring a selection of works back to New Zealand for shows with rm103 and the Blue Oyster Art Project Space. As Brydee Rood recounts, the real exchange began to take place, after getting introduced to the personal spaces and private lives of the invited Japanese artists:

The home cooked flat dinner with the humungous plate of many mushroom 'supagetti'. We all sat around in a teeny tiny space, the equivalent of half a small hallway but actually it was their lounge, sharing spagetti, drinking beer and chu hi and talking about ideas. Now that was some crazy perspective! Dialogues as slippery as the spag we were slurping up, the interesting saucy goo which sticks our project together.

A cultural exchange on shoe-string budget, or 'a perspective from elsewhere' Michelle explains in the following text:

The Perspective of Elsewhere allows us to imagine openly in any direction. When daydreaming, drifting off, or seeming preoccupied we are described as being 'elsewhere', detached from the reality of our immediate circumstance. This dislocation, the mental, ideological and physical possibilities of being 'elsewhere'--in another place or between places--instigates Hello Lamb's collective investigation into 'the perspective of elsewhere'. By practicing being mentally elsewhere (through the production of artwork that dislocates common perceptions) and being physically elsewhere (travelling to Japan to exhibit their work and bringing Japanese artists to New Zealand), the Hello Lamb collective probes the shifting possibilities of a 'perspective of elsewhere,' asking: Where is elsewhere? What is it like? How can we get there?

Reaching 'the perspective of elsewhere' assumes a point of departure, a common ground from which to launch other perspectives. To be 'elsewhere' you need to be 'somewhere' first. Hello Lamb's 'somewhere' is found in a reaction to, and observation of dislocation. Each work bounces out of a curiosity for displacement: be it cultural, physical, or ideological

Brydee explains the concept of the DIY shelf and how it came about:

The HL artists got together and talked; we began thinking about what we would exhibit in this context ... it wasn't too long before the idea of The Do It Yourself Shelf Museum Of Possibilities developed. I was writing proposals in search of funding and I wanted to find a way to bring our thoughts together in a way that somehow responded to what it was we were doing by trying to get there, to GEISAI, to an emerging art fair...

Emerging / early career artists anywhere face a highly challenging road. Do It Yourself refers to a kind of in-grained and localised self-determination. Kiwi ingenuity, where we grew up making things work out of what we had, or what we could afford at the time. For most of us out there things don't just land in your lap, you have to do it yourself, make it happen for yourself. That's certainly a common experience for early career artists pushing forward in their local habitat.

So along came the ideas for a DIY Museum, a little one, it had to be so, confined by the size restrictions of the standard GEISAI booth, but limitless in terms of possibilities that could develop from the process and the action of doing it! So a portable (well we thought it most portable at the time, before we set about lugging it around Tokyo) kit-set thing seemed to make sense. And museums are full of shelves, cabinets, displays etc., which left us compelled to just go ahead and find a simple DIY common shelf unit and use it as a port-key to future possibilities, of cultural exchange, of new connections, a platform to exhibit on, to create our display... I like the fact that they are typical garage shelf units, they are not special, that something from the garage can become a museum, like when you are a child building huts out of blankets and chairs but to you it is a mansion in the sky filled with delight and adventure... and all because you did it yourself, you made it happen.