12 questions with visual artist Jonathan Zawada

Australian multidisciplinary artist, Jonathan Zawada's longtime friendship with electronic music producer Mark Pritchard led him to his latest project: an hour-long visual companion to Pritchard's latest album Tell Tales, made in conjunction with Radiohead's Thom Yorke. Tell Tales is an exploration of modern-age anxiety, an electronic record brought to life by Zawada's surrealist, CGI-influenced art – bizarro technicolour creatures, eerie landscapes and uncanny objects which serve as a something of a modern day fairytale.

Combined with Yorke's uneasy lyricism, the film makes surreal comment on the confusing and often implausible times we live in.

As the film releases in select cinemas, we ask Zawada to take on the Wallpaper* Q&A.

What have you been working on? How does it differ from your previous work?

I’ve been wrapping up on a large body of work to accompany Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s album called Tall Tales. It’s been something of an enormous undertaking and has been in the works for the past four to five years – which is a very long time for me to be working on any one thing and it’s something of a challenge to maintain a consistent creative line of thought and perspective over such a long period of time. One of the major differences for me in the way I approached this project was to attempt to blend a wide variety of aesthetic approaches within a single body of work, where everything relates and connects to each other, and has an aesthetic sympathy but is also wholly its own thing. I really wanted to reflect something that I was hearing in the music in that respect. That was made especially challenging in that I also wanted to attempt to tackle creating everything myself, rather than working with any collaborators.

When do you feel the most creative?

When I wake in the middle of the night tends to be the time I have the clearest ideas and a pure sense of things. I think the fact that it's impossible to do anything about it at that time and so the reality of execution is a million miles away is what makes that the most creatively fruitful moment. My mind must feel totally unencumbered.

What’s a no-skips album and who introduced you to it?

To be totally honest I’ve always forced myself to play all music 'no-skips' since I realised in my teens that I was short-changing myself whenever I was skipping tracks, it kind of feels like I’m disrespecting or insulting the artist if I ever skip. One of the most recent albums which feels like a true album in that respect is I Inside The Old Year Dying by PJ Harvey which I think Mark Pritchard and I chatted about as soon as it was released. It is such a beautiful piece of work in so many ways and one of the first albums I’ve heard in a very long time that makes me feel the way listening to albums did when I was in my teens and early twenties, a kind of sitting-late-at-night-listening-with-full-attention kind of album.

What do you consider to be a perfectly designed object?

1992 Nissan Exa is a perfectly designed object because there is no way to not enjoy yourself driving that car. The concept of the removable targa hard top roof is one piece of genius that society should never have turned away from but the additional idea of a removable hatch-back boot panel is a step beyond into perfection.

When was the last time you were affected by a piece of art?

I recently visited the Dia Beacon again, the first time I had been was 20 years ago and at that time it left such a resonant and deep impact on me that I would frequently revisit my memory of it as a source of how impactful art can be. In particular the Richard Serra pieces and the giant holes by Michael Heizer. On return though, obviously a lot there had changed both in the museum and in me and the work that spoke to me most was of an entirely different quality, which was Duo Nesting Boxes by Larry Bell. The mixture of the light in the space, interacting with the work left me feeling hollowed out in that strange way that only exceptional pieces when viewed at the right time can. I find it interesting that in my youth it was the giant structures of great weight and imposing mass that impacted me and this time it was the work made of light and air.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

The only real advice I can remember being given was when Elton John bought one of my paintings from my first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and he told me that I should leave Australia. 15 years later I’m back living in Australia again but at the time it was excellent advice, both personally and professionally.

Name another artist that everyone should know about

Everyone should know the joy of the work of Uwe Henneken. His sublime paintings capture something I wish I could achieve, there is a beautiful lightness to them and a playful effortlessness even as they dive into disorienting and unbalancing spaces that are normally the preserve or work that leans on darkness and negativity.

Why do you make art?

I’ve only just realised this in the past six months or so when I tried to take some extended time away from the studio to spend more time with my kids but making art – or really making anything for that matter – must function as a kind of meditation. It settles my mind and calms my anxiety. The satisfaction from having completed something and wandered around within a specific thought or a feeling in order to get there has no equal for me and I can become a pretty unhappy person without it. My background in more traditional design work made me think that I wanted to communicate with people but I don’t think that’s the case at all anymore, it’s entirely self-serving.

What’s your biggest insecurity?

The fact that I don’t have a University degree of any kind. In particular in the art world it is almost impossible not to feel like a charlatan and an outsider without one, as if everyone else knows the basic set of secret rules and they can all see me breaking them and getting things wrong like a total amateur.

Which film have you watched the most?

It would probably be Adaptation. For me it's probably the perfect film, the way it folds in on itself while still managing to be about something simple and pure, about life and nature and the trap that is the human mind.

ADAPTATION [2002] - Official Trailer (HD) - YouTube

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If we opened the Notes app on your phone, what would we find?

I don’t use Notes but one of the first apps that I ever got, and that I’ve used consistently since my first iPhone is called Workflowy. It’s a sort of infinitely nesting list app and it contains absolutely everything in my life in it, from my daughter’s first words to ideas for gifts for family, films that people have suggested to me, all the work projects I have on and what I have to do for them today along with every idea I've had for an art piece or thought about anything at all that I feel like might be useful someday. It is truly the most perfect piece of digital design and I’m not sure how I’d function without it.

Complete this sentence. I like to surround myself with...

...a large expanse of nature devoid of people, as colourful as is possible.