episode thirty-nine | omar bin musa

Published 14 April 2020

Miranda Metcalf  Hello print friends, and welcome to the 39th episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend), the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I usually release an episode every two weeks, but now that we're all navigating through this new normal, you may have noticed that they've been coming out every week or so. I'm gonna try and keep that up for as long as I can, so welcome back, all. Glad you're here. This week's episode is another that I was able to record in person using sound equipment I purchased with the generous support of the PCL patrons on Patreon. You all are amazing, and you literally keep the lights on over at our studio, which is just my bedroom. But thank you all so, so very much. I did also want to make sure to say though, I know this is an incredibly scary and unstable time for many of us in the arts. So if you're finding yourself in a position where you can't be supporting PCL with the money right now, I get it. I've already had a couple of people have to pull out after being supporters from almost day one, and no hard feelings at all. We all have to look out for each other, but we need to be looking after ourselves as well. Put on your oxygen mask first - or maybe just your face mask these days - before assisting others. So if you can help, awesome, if you can't, no worries. Printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party. My guest this week is Omar Musa, a Malaysian Australian rapper, poet, published author, and self-taught printmaker from Queanbeyan. Since discovering woodcuts in the last few years, Omar has been making some of the most heartfelt and honest prints with some of the most masterful pairings of language and image I've ever seen. And also, very luckily for me, Omar is a bit of a famous. When we spoke, he was just coming off a tour with Kate Tempest, which means he's probably been interviewed more than any other guest I've had. So he speaks beautifully and engagingly about his process, and he has a great Australian accent. We talk about his discovery of wood cuts while on a writing retreat in Borneo, printmaking activism, storytelling, quite a bit about the highs and lows of the creative process, and we even close with Omar performing one of his most recent poems. You're gonna love it. So sit back, relax, and prepare to get pulled into the story with Omar Musa. Hey Omar, how's it going?

Omar Musa  Hey, I'm well. Thanks for having me.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, thank you for joining me. I am very excited to do another in person interview, and with you. I'm just recovering a little bit from a cold, so hopefully I'm more Lauren Bacall than I am super nasally for the interview. But I'd say worth pushing through, because we've been trying to find a chance to sit down together for a while.

Omar Musa  I'm looking forward to it. This is my first ever interview about my visual art practice.

Miranda Metcalf  I know! I'm super excited, because I was thinking about this before, like we said, you've probably been interviewed in general more than anyone who's been on the podcast before, because you've had this whole initial career in spoken word and rap and poetry, and kind of came to printmaking more recently. And so I think, before we totally dive into things, I sort of try to get my guests to answer my three standard questions to give a bit of background, which I call the who you are, where you are, what you do.

Omar Musa  Who am I? I am a Malaysian Australian scallywag, reprobate, and troublemaker who makes work in the field of the arts in general, I would say. I'm more known for my poetry and my novel writing, and also my hip hop career. But I've never had a problem sort of bouncing in and out and in between genres and mediums, but most of them have been associated with writing. And this recent foray into the visual arts has been really exciting for me, and something completely unexpected, even though when I was young, when I was a kid, I loved painting and I loved drawing as well. Where am I? I'm in the nation's capital of Australia, Canberra. But I actually come from Queanbeyan, which is across the border in New South Wales, known as Struggletown, the Two Six Two Oh, I like to call it the Venice of the Eden-Monaro. No one else calls it that. But yeah, I'm very, very proudly from Queanbeyan, it was a place that used to get looked down upon a lot by by Canberrans, which in turn is looked down upon by a lot of people in Australia. So you know, I think that shows you where I'm from. And what was the third question?

Miranda Metcalf  So I think that you might have just answered them, because it was who you are, where you are, what you do? So I think that's it.

Omar Musa  What I do. Yeah, those are the things I do, but mostly words. But, interestingly enough, I've always conceived of my writing in a very visual sense. A lot of my poems, and even my novel, were based on kind of visions, or even hallucinations, you could call them, that I've then tried to describe with words. So very visually, and in a visceral way, that I often hoped would replicate a painting or even a movie, sort of the cinema. And so I take my cues a lot from that. And even when I'm writing, people asked me this age old question of, 'How do you deal with writer's block?' And one of my answers is that in Australia, but in many countries, we're lucky enough to have public art galleries. And so oftentimes, if I'm at a bit of a loss for what to write about, I'll go to the National Portrait Gallery, or the National Gallery of Australia, and just have a wander around and always find that the visual will pique my interest and inflame my imagination in a way that gets me working again.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, cuz you were saying you grew up in Queanbeyan, which is just down the road from these galleries. Was going to them something that you did as a child? Was visual arts a big part, because you said you love to draw, but was it something kind of beyond that that took up a lot of time and cultural space in the house that you grew up in?

Omar Musa  Yeah, definitely. It did. My grandma was a painter, an avid painter, so even up until she got put in a nursing home when she was 90, she was still working with acrylics and painting, usually kind of landscapes or country scenes, things like that. But I remember when I was young, she would really encourage me, and as presents for Christmas and stuff, she'd give me pencils to sketch with and also pastels, and sort of helped me in that way. And so drawing was my first love, even before writing poetry and everything. And then also, I come from a fairly artistically focused family. My mum was the arts editor of the Canberra Times, the major newspaper here, and before that ran Muse Arts Magazine, which was an independent arts magazine here in Canberra. And so I was really lucky and had a really privileged upbringing in that I would go to exhibition openings all the time, we would go to galleries and to these major institutions when I was a kid, as well as the theater and concerts and things like that. And so, in a weird way, I think through osmosis, I kind of took in a whole bunch of artistic influences, even though now I'm in my mid 30s, and I sometimes feel a bit out of my depth in these spaces. And I'm not formally trained or anything like that. But I think that was a form of training, you know, firstly, a love of the arts and having a mother and a father who are true believers in the function of the arts in society, that the arts constitutes civilization, basically, or not necessarily civilization, but humanity. Like, in a world that often focuses on economics or monetary things, a society that doesn't value the arts is, in a way, of no value. You know what I mean? And so that was, I guess, a form of early training in just the way that I saw the world.

Miranda Metcalf  Absolutely. At what point would you say that the words start to take over and become your major focus and the visual arts, at least for the time being, sort of fall to the wayside a little bit for you?

Omar Musa  I know exactly when that happened. I don't know what it's like in the States, but here, when you go into the final years of high school, you have to choose certain subjects. And certain subjects clash with one another in terms of when the periods are in the school day. And so I had previously been doing drama or theater, which was also a love of mine in high school. And it was at the same time as visual art when you chose to do the final two years of school. And so I would have preferred to do both. But I chose drama just because I think, to be honest, I was probably a little bit better at it. But also it had much more of a, it seemed to me, a collaborative and social side. You're doing it with a bunch of your friends, whereas the visual arts seemed a lot more individually focused. It was almost like choosing between a team sport or individual sport in a way, you know? And I was always much more into that too, like playing basketball or rugby as opposed to athletic or track and field. And so I can identify exactly when it was. It was in year 11, I just had to choose, and I chose drama. And sometimes these days, I wonder whether I made the right choice, but the world works in very mysterious ways. Because then, through my other practices, I came back into visual art 20 years later.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And I think that's really fascinating, because some of the words that were you were using to describe why you kind of went towards more drama and performance are the exact words that people use to describe printmaking. Which is that like, collaborative, community based... so I think there's really that tie there, right? Where you found your way back in to visual arts, but through something that still holds those threads that originally attracted you to it.

Omar Musa  Yeah, definitely. That's interesting. That hasn't been pointed out to me before. And it's completely true, because the way that I got back into it - I guess this is a good time now to talk about it - is going back to my motherland, homeland, of Borneo in East Malaysia, that shares a border as well with Indonesia. And I started working with some guys called Pangrok Sulap. In particular, one of the ex-members, a guy called Eric Lost Control. That's not his government name. But it's his sort of punk rock name. And so this is a collective of artists who were all originally sort of from villages up in the mountains, indigenous guys, who were all into punk rock music but began making woodcuts, I think probably over 10 years ago, something like that. They'd originally been taught by some guys from Taring Padi, who are really famous Indonesian collective, who are also I think musicians and punk rockers who have themes that relate to environmental destruction, corruption in power. And it's very, very political work, but very community based. This collective, they always put their name, Pangrok Sulap, which means "Punk Rock From the Hut," or - a sulap is kind of a farmer's hut where people can rest in the fields. And the whole point of it is that they don't have their individual names on it. It's about the community, it's about the collective. And so it was a very welcoming way to be reintroduced into the arts, because I have a lot of friends who are artists in Sydney and in Australia. And you know, it seems, to me at least - I will still say from an outsider's perspective, because I don't yet completely feel as if I'm in the art world in that way - it does seem quite competitive oftentimes, and individually based, the practices - even though I see a lot of collaborations and stuff as well. But just that kind of collective nature of it, and how welcoming they were, there was no sort of defensiveness or anything, it was, 'Oh, brother, come along, get involved in this, and we are more than happy to teach you and teach you technique and sit down with you.' You know, we would all sit on the ground and make woodcuts and tell yarns and light cigarettes and stuff.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And so out of curiosity, I'm kind of thinking about how you say they sign every woodcut with the same name, which is the name of the collective. Do they work collaboratively on single pieces? Or do they each do their own pieces and it just... was it kind of like a combination of that?

Omar Musa  I think mostly, they collaborate on single pieces. Massive scale works as well. I mean, I've seen some that, if I'm not mistaken, are about a story high and stuff, that can hang as banners printed on cloth. Yeah, I've definitely seen them all work on their own individual ones as well. But oftentimes, they'll have like six to eight members working on a huge one at a time. And they've done work where they'll go to a village, for instance, collect the stories of the village, from the head hunting days, or what's happening with logging, these sort of things. And then they'll get the village people to work on the woodcuts alongside them. So sometimes there'll be, I don't know, like 15 people working on one at a time. And then they print these massive ones, and they've done those around the world, not just in Borneo, but India and Bangladesh as well and up in Taiwan. And that side of it attracted me, too, because it was storytelling. And they put quite a big emphasis on that. Like I remember they were doing one with a certain village where they said, 'Well, a lot of people here, maybe their literacy skills aren't that great.' And so they could tell the story of the history of the village in a medium that everybody could understand. Because everyone can understand the visual, you know. And that was pretty cool to me. And I wanted to sort of be inspired and take from that worldview or that approach to art making, because you know, storytelling is what I do.

Miranda Metcalf  Right. So when you went about approaching your first woodcuts, was that really a conscious choice? Were you thinking, 'I'm a storyteller, I'm going to create, I'm going to tell stories with this,' or was it kind of more intuitive, like, they just put something in your hand and you started to work on a block?

Omar Musa  It was completely intuitive, and that's what was so exciting and enthralling about it for me. It also came at a time in my life when I think I was looking for something new, a new medium through which to express myself. It's quite a personal story in a way. I had been overseas and had been touring constantly, for months if not years, just on the road doing shows and writing. And I felt like the thing that I had once loved, writing, I now hated and felt was stagnant. And I think there are major pitfalls in turning your passion into a profession. Because you always think when you're young that that's the dream, to take this thing that you love and make money from it and earn your living from it. But actually, it can sap that love. In that way, I often think of writing for me as a beautiful destroyer that diminishes me as much as it allows me to flourish or as much as it fulfills me. And in the end, the writer just gets smaller and smaller and dwindles and dwindles until there's just nothing left of him. It's quite a dark way of looking at it, but sometimes that's how I've thought about it. And two years ago, I had like a mini kind of mental breakdown, really, because of all of this stuff. And I felt like I'd come to an impasse in my life. And I didn't know what to do, because writing was my life. And it was me. And performing was me. And I felt like I needed to leave it behind, but if I left it behind, what would be left of me, you know? And so I went on this crazy journey in Borneo on the Indonesian side, where I took a ferry from a place called Samarinda on the East Coast, which is at the opening of this huge river called the Mahakam River that traditionally was the major trade route for people from the ocean to trade with the peoples of the interior, right in the heart of Borneo. Right in the jungle. Orang Ulu, they're called, the original people. And so I took this three or four day journey just sleeping on the deck of the ferry, going right into the heart of my homeland, and it felt like a very special, liberating moment for me, and a journey I needed to take getting in touch with my history and my ancestry. And going and seeing these beautiful longhouses, which are exactly that, they're just long, long houses that people live in, but also conduct ceremony in, and they have beautifully carved strata, almost like a Maori marae, with different kinds of spiritual figures and animal forms carved into the strata of the longhouse. And they even have skulls hanging up in the ceiling from the head hunting days, you know, which weren't all that long ago. And as a side note, I talked to some people about it, and I said, 'Do people still do it?' And they go, 'No, no, no, that's all in the past. But look, if someone's really bad... it's actually alright to still take their head.' It was pretty full on. But anyway, I had this kind of moment of almost spiritual catharsis taking this journey. And then directly after that, I crossed the border to the Malaysian side, where my family's from, and I was at a place called Tamparuli, where they've got one of the only arts residences in the whole island, the Tamparuli Living Arts Center. And a lot of the practice that they do there is woodcut workshops, but also music. So the people there, Christina and Herman who run the place, the caretakers - and Christina actually is a really incredible printmaker herself - they invited me to come to kind of an open day and to perform, because that's what they knew me for. That's what they would know. And so I went and performed some poems and did a couple of songs, but then I could see out of the corner of my eye that they were running, on the other side of the building, a woodcut workshop, carving into kind of basically cheap soft brown MDF, and then printing it with their feet onto cloth and paper. And I saw it, and I thought, 'That looks way cooler than what I'm doing! I want to do that.' And so I kind of very nervously and tentatively approached them, approached Eric, who's this crazy punk rocker, sort of covered in scars and slashes and tattoos all over his body, with this big grin. And I said, 'I don't think I'll be any good at this. But I would like to try it. Is there any chance I can try it?' And then he said, 'Yeah, of course! Of course, sit down.' And so he gave me a V shaped gouge and a U shaped one. And he just said, 'These have different effects. One is a skinnier, deeper groove. The other one is a more shallow, short groove, and you can use them to different effects. But just draw something and carve it.' And so I was looking around, and we're pretty much - not exactly in the jungle, but you know, it's a smaller town next to a river, and you're surrounded by the forest and by thickets and everything. And we have beautiful endemic species of animals over there in Borneo. And I was trying to think, what is the most beautiful thing that I know of that I could carve? Because I just spent so much time with my writing, writing about the dark side of humanity and brutality and violence and toxic masculinity and drug culture and crime, you know, like these things... and racism, you know, these things are what I preoccupy myself with. I just wanted to make something beautiful, and the most beautiful thing that I knew was the Bornean clouded leopard. So I scratched out a little woodcut of a Bornean leopard. And then I put a cloud above it, and I said, 'When the loggers are away, the leopards will play.' Just a little couplet. I don't even know if that's a couplet, it's just one line, but it rhymes. And that was my very first one. And I don't know, when I look back at it now, it's kind of cool because it's very naive, to use that word, I suppose. But it's not technically advanced at all. But they all looked at it, and they all said, 'Oh, this is really cool.' And Eric said, 'Oh, I think you can be good at this,' you know, he said, 'I think you can be good at this.' And he was like, 'Here, have a little piece of MDF, and I'll give you this V gouge and this U gouge. Take it away, and practice on your own.' And I did, I took it away. And I was actually staying in a longhouse in another remote area. And I was just looking out over the paddy fields. And I decided to carve that. And I described the conversations I'd had with the local indigenous people there about "adat," which is about their sort of customs and traditions and land rights. So I made one about that, I brought it back. And then you know, it just kept going from there. I became preoccupied and obsessed with woodcuts. And you know, I came back to Canberra, and I had this new lease on life. I'd found something completely unexpected. I never thought I would be making anything visual. Even just my first response, the first thing I said to him, saying, 'Oh, I don't think I'll be very good at this.' I had no confidence in myself, I didn't know that this is something I would do. It was just intuitive, as you asked before. And I came back, and I was just like, 'How am I going to get more into this?' Because my visual artist friends here, people like Jason Phu, or Abdul Abdullah, really great, well known artists here. They all thought it was cool. And I was like, 'Really? I don't know, like, you actually think it's good?' Like, I thought they were gassing me up, you know? And they did, and so I was really excited by that. And so I was talking to some mates and they were saying, 'Oh, well that type of wood...' Because at first I tried to buy some wood, and it was really hard. It was like rosewood, and it was hard to carve because of the grain, and my tools weren't good enough. And I thought, 'Well, I can't really afford to get those super crazy Japanese tools.' And so I was like, 'Well, why can't I carve the same way as I was in Borneo?' Because I didn't know what the wood was that they used. And so I went to Bunnings and just got some MDF, you know, cheap MDF, and it carved like butter. And I liked that it wasn't as hard as that rosewood or anything, but it's so physical and you have to put your body into it and your shoulder, whereas I found lino too slippery or something. And then I was chatting away to my friend Claire Jackson, who was, I think, quite surprised that I was getting into this medium, but also was really encouraging and said, 'Oh, you should come into Megalo printmaking studio sometime.' And again, I don't know if she was just gassing me up. Because after that, I messaged her a few times, she blanked me, ghosted me, and then eventually I think she saw that I was serious about it. And I came in, and she really helped me and encouraged me with working with the press for the first time, an electric press, and she introduced me to a great guy called Tim Pauszek. You might have heard of him. Brilliant printmaker from the States who also was very encouraging, and just would give me different tips on different effects that I could use with my woodcuts, different cut - like, there were certain things, because I was learning by myself, that I just didn't know about. Like, I would get that orange skin kind of texture on my prints a lot that I was printing with my feet, because I was putting too much ink or not stiffening it enough, this sort of stuff. And so these really simple things that I'm sure you learn at art school, I had no idea about, because I was just printing with my feet in my kitchen after one workshop in Borneo. Really exciting, coming in, and these guys being able to not just inspire me and show me different artists, but also troubleshoot. Things that... I'd been flying in the dark, which was exciting, but also it can be frustrating because you're just like, 'Oh, why isn't it coming out like it was before?'

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, totally. And it is really unusual for someone to come to printmaking outside of the university setting. Usually particularly in that Western narrative of things, like almost every person on the podcast, "'How'd you come to printmaking?' 'Oh, I just wandered into the print shop at school, you know?'" So you were really coming at it in an unusual way, but then again, that community was there to kind of just be the teachers, to just fill in the little blanks here and there that you hadn't... you know, as you said, just from one workshop. I think particularly with woodcut, it is deceptively complicated, because you just think, oh, you're just making some marks on a piece of wood, and then you put ink on it, and then you pull it off. But to get the real crispness, to get that exacting perfection that you're probably after, you do need to know about stiffening the ink and what tool to use and that kind of thing. So they're able to offer that.

Omar Musa  And it was cool seeing sort of the breadth of different ways you can make prints, and some people even telling me that they would print with a wheelbarrow, or their car, or something like that. That was really cool. But I'm so glad that I started in that way, doing it with the feet, which apparently is quite a Southeast Asian sort of thing. Like people in Cambodia apparently do it that way, Malaysia, Indonesia. And what's cool, I forgot to tell you, about the Pangrok Sulap guys, is that they will play music on the guitar while they step on their works, because it gives it extra soul. 

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, I love that. 

Omar Musa  And so there was that whole history as well of carving wood. I mean, whether you are interior people in Borneo, jungle people, carving the strata of your longhouses and those sorts of forms, or ocean people like my grandfather, the boughs of the boats of the people from in between Eastern Borneo and the Philippines are carved beautifully with intricate patterns and designs and flowers and different motifs. So in a weird way, not to get too spiritual about it, but the carving of wood is in our history, in our culture, and it flows in my bloodline. So in a way, it's no coincidence, maybe, that this is the form that I was sort of drawn to and attracted to. Like, I've got uncles who, just in their spare time in the village, they'll be whittling wood. And they would give that to us as kids, little forms that they made, little helicopters that they carved, mats that they had woven, bags that they had woven out of rattan. It's an ancient thing. Often these guys in Borneo say, 'Oh, we've been doing it for just over 10 years or 15 years.' But you know, I think there's a reason why we're drawn to it like ducks to water.

Miranda Metcalf  Right. So another thing that I was a bit interested in too, was, we talked about you going to it and how you just kind of picked it up and really came to it from an intuitive place. And it sounds like words were even in your first woodcut. Which I think is another thing that... you've got a really distinctive aesthetic, and of course, part of that is that words are in it. And so it's even right there from the beginning. Which I think is really interesting. And I think a lot of times, when words are added to images, they can seem really heavy handed or kind of clumsy or too didactic. But there's always a really beautiful balance in your work between the words and the images. And I'm wondering if that's something that you were ever concerned about, or if it just was natural to add the words, or did you have to think about it like, 'Oh, I don't want to feel like I'm making a storybook out of my poetry,' or that kind of concern, if that was ever there for you.

Omar Musa  Yeah, a little bit. Definitely - I mean, just even with my words in general, being heavy handed is always a bit of a risk. But now I sort of see myself as a bit of a sniper when it comes to the lines, you know? When I was younger, I was very scattershot with the way that I approached words, and would shoot them out very chaotically. But now I like to pick them off. And I think this has honed me even more, because I don't put loads of words or text on my woodcuts, I use just a line or two. And in a way, I was informed also by those guys, by Taring Padi and Pangrok Sulap, because their work sometimes reminded me of old activist or propaganda posters that would only have a few words, but they really sort of stuck out. And even those themes I've adopted a little bit too, sort of about environmental destruction, a lot of my work concerns that. And also I was influenced by my friend Jason Phu, who uses a lot of words in his work, and he was a printmaker too - and is, I don't know - but does a lot of painting now. Really great Chinese, Vietnamese, Aussie artist. And he uses a lot of humor. So I found that this was also a way of showing a more comical or humorous or lighthearted side, which I found pretty exciting, because I think sometimes  people think I might be really deadly serious. And so I kind of found that I could use very limited words, and very boiled down essential words, just in the same way as you would do with poetry. But even more honed, I would say. You have to choose them so carefully. And I always add the words at the end. So I sometimes don't know what the poem or what the couplet is going to be. So the visual does come first. And then that informs what words I'm going to put in. And so I let it marinate and fellow in my head as I'm carving. And it slowly takes a form after I see what I'm doing, what I'm making. So I'll often have the main subject of it visually drawn out, but then the effects and the stuff that goes around it, the images that go around it, take shape as I'm doing it. And so it's spontaneous in that way. And then the words come at the very end. Which is interesting, because people often ask me that with the hip hop stuff, too. Like, 'What comes first, is it the words or the music?' And to me, the music has to come first, because it's hip hop, it's music, it's a musical form. So the music influences and directs you where to go. And so I sort of try to take that same approach with the art. I'm trying to think if there's anything I've done where the words have come first, but I don't think there is.

Miranda Metcalf  And particularly with something like woodcut where you've got this meditative time with the block. And so that whole time, you're sort of discovering the image, and really how it's taking form, all of that, the words [are] I'm sure sort of marinating and swirling around, and you have this built in time through the nature of the medium to focus and think through, 'Okay, what needs to be a part of this image?'

Omar Musa  Yeah, I mean, the physical side of it is something that I found really liberating, because it really is a highly thought taxing, intellectual pursuit as much as anything, but the timeframe of it or something is longer than my writing, which is in really short, sharp, intense flurries. And the physical side of it means that I can go into more of a long term trance-like state than I can with writing. I would never be able to sit down and write for 12 hours straight. I can do that with a woodcut. And I think it's that combination of the kind of cerebral, and then the physical side of it, as well, where it's just like, 'Okay, I know what image I've got. Now, I've just got to put the hard yards and elbow grease into carving the block.' And that balance is really cool. And also, I can listen to music while I do it. Whereas with my writing, and this might sound weird because I'm a musician as well, but with my writing it has to be dead silent. If I ever listened to music, it would be instrumental, but that never would happen. Whereas I can listen to podcasts, I can listen to music with lyrics and words when I'm carving a woodblock, which is, I find it more enjoyable. And this also might sound weird, but it feels almost as if it's the first time I've actually enjoyed the creative process in many, many years. I find that writing, to me, as I mentioned before, that beautiful destroyer type thing, but it's brutal and painful and suicide inducing, as opposed to something I enjoy. Which is why, in some ways, I'm trying to keep the visual stuff a bit more sacred and still keep that childlike playfulness and joy that I had when I made that first one in Borneo. And so, I don't know, it's something that I'm trying to navigate at the moment, even though people seem to be responding really well to my work. And the exhibitions I've had have sold out and everything, it's been an amazing experience. But I know the pitfalls associated with that as well, with if I suddenly was like, 'Okay, this is going to be my main thing,' you then start to put pressure on yourself, there's external pressure, you torture yourself. But maybe that's just part of making art, or making good art. Maybe that's always going to be a part of it. Because I definitely, in making some of the shows, I've taken myself into those spaces where I'm like, 'Oh my god,' you know, and I'm really stressing out about how to finish this work or sort of stretch out my brain elasticity in a way that I'm not used to, or makes me feel uncomfortable or uneasy. Maybe that discomfort is something you need to make good work. I don't know. It's something I'm navigating anyway.

Miranda Metcalf  I had a good friend who was a filmmaker, and he said something about the creative process that always stuck with me, which is that something's not good until you hate it. 

Omar Musa  Right. Yeah, yeah. Could be. 

Miranda Metcalf  And I think it's not 100% true, cuz I do know every once in a while that kind of magic creation comes along that, it was a pain free birth. But it's the exception rather than the rule.

Omar Musa  I'd say so as well. Yeah. I've found that with poems and with songs and things like that. Every now and then, the painless birth - I mean, that's an amazing feeling. But a very, very rare one. The weird thing being, though, that those are usually the best pieces of work that you create. You can torture yourself over years and years with a piece of work, and sometimes it just doesn't quite work.

Miranda Metcalf  It's like that lightning in the bottle kind of a thing, that just... and I think so much of the creative process is this maybe somewhat fruitless struggle of trying to figure out, how did I get there? You know, what was the magic combination? Was I just hungover enough and this one song was playing and I had just talked to my mom on the phone? And like, that was the magic combination? But you have to just wait. It's like being a sailor in a tiny boat on the sea, and you're rowing and rowing and rowing, and every once in a while the wind comes along that actually pushes you exactly where you need to go.

Omar Musa  But you do have to keep rowing, I think. Because I think it's a bit of a rogue's excuse when writers or artists say, 'Oh, no, I just sit there and wait for inspiration to strike.' I think inspiration's sort of... well, I was gonna say it's more likely to strike if you keep working and give it more of an opportunity to, I don't know if that's necessarily the case. But I do think if you are, in your soul, an artist, you just have to keep making work. And if that work is fruitful, or if the work works, then it does. If it doesn't, then that's okay as well. You sort of let it fall by the wayside, and you just keep going and you keep making.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. I think it was Werner Hertzog that once said, 'If you sit around and wait for inspiration, you'll die before you make anything.' You just, you can't, you can't. You just have to push through those white knuckling teeth pulling days, because every once in a while you get the wind in your sails.

Omar Musa  And it's an incredibly fraught kind of life, or fraught process, but that's okay. I think sometimes the problem is, we get so full of fear at making mistakes or looking like an idiot or looking foolish. But our successes, if we ever have any, are only the culmination of all of our mistakes. And you will never get anywhere if you haven't made a million mistakes. And so yeah, I guess that's what I'm in the process of doing with the woodcuts, but I'm really enjoying it. And I think maybe that's where the joy lies for me as well, is that there isn't really any pressure, because people know me for this other thing. They don't expect me to be any good at this. And it's sort of like, you know, it's a nice surprise when people are like, 'Oh, this is actually not too bad!'

Miranda Metcalf  Well, I have noticed - it's interesting, when you were talking about kind of continuing to try to keep these woodcuts in this place of joy, because I have noticed that your words, when they're not appearing in a woodcut, are definitely darker. And so it makes sense now why that is. Because they're not saccharin in any way, shape, or form. But there's a bit more of a levity, there's a bit more of a hopefulness with the criticalness. And it must just come because it sort of exists now in this special place in your creative process, that you can do that. Which is really great.

Omar Musa  I think that's true. And I don't know, it's kind of funny, because sometimes I see visual artists who are struggling so hard to come up with this really critical, postmodern, intellectual description... or reasoning for creating this work. When sometimes you think, 'Is that really what you were thinking? Or did you just think that was a cool interesting image?' You know what I mean? So I guess I'm just at a point where I don't care. Like, if someone thinks I'm real basic, that's okay. But yeah, I mean, I really enjoy that, sort of the levity of it. And I think Jason Phu was a huge influence on me in that way. 

Miranda Metcalf  I'd love to get him on the podcast as well. 

Omar Musa  Oh, yeah, you really should. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, he's on my list, for sure.

Omar Musa  And Abdul as well, Abdul Abdullah, I mean, he's got a lot of humor in his work. And sort of realizing that, you know, I think it's a really amazing feeling as an artist, I can relate to it more as a writer than anything, but that moment when you realize, 'I didn't know you could do that,' you know? 'I didn't realize that it was okay to do that thing.' And those moments of epiphany are huge. And I think realizing, oh, yeah, when I make my woodcuts, I don't have to make them super serious and navel gazing, or hypercritical political pieces, even though, because I am who I am, a lot of my work has ended up having that political sort of resonance. But realizing they could be funny, and they could joke around and be tongue in cheek. That was a cool moment of realization for me.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I think this would be a great sort of segue a bit into talking about maybe your most recent body of work.

Omar Musa  I did an exhibition and a bunch of work based on this idea of a mythical utopian place that I made up in my head called Leopard Beach, which is a place where I can sometimes escape to in my own mind, and where I have escaped when I was feeling depressed, anxious, and even, not to put too fine a point on it, suicidal. And so I think all utopias and all escapism is based usually around the idea that this world isn't working properly or functioning well, and things are falling apart. And so you can kind of project a vision of a world, or the world as it might one day be or could be, if we as humans acted in a different way and treated our environment better, treated each other better, distributed wealth better. And so I kind of came up with this idea of Leopard Beach that was 100% body positive, plastic free, and we'd use bright colors to replicate the almost old vintage Hawaiian kind of postcards or something like that, beachside towns. And of course, the whole thing seems very joyous, but what it's really saying is that our world is kinda fucked up. You know? And so Leopard Beach, it's about the environment, but a lot of it is about mental health and a response to depression and to moments of when you feel in such a dark place that you feel as if you're going mad. And so there is that dark side to that brightness and that exuberance of Leopard Beach, and there was one big piece, the final piece, and you saw me printing it, called "All Was Ablaze." That is probably the darkest and most surreal thing I created for the Welcome to Leopard Beach exhibition that I think contextualizes all of the joyousness and exuberance, which is influenced by the bushfires that devastated our country, by the parade of vulgarity and militant idiocy that we see in Australian politics, and often in responses by even our prime minister to the bushfires, or even lack of response to the bushfires, and our climate change policy or lack thereof, you know, all these types of things. And that is a bit closer to my writing. That shows a world that has lost equilibrium, a world of darkness, madness, and horror that we are slowly slipping into, or not so slowly. And so it sort of sometimes asks the question, is escapism irresponsible? Because we're actually ignoring real action? Or is it, through projecting the world as it might be, the impetus for changing the way we think and the way we act? And so those were some of the ideas I was thinking of behind the exhibition.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. That's a really, really good question that I think is so pertinent to the world that we're living in, right now, today, March 9, 2020. This, how do we face the horrors of the world without going mad? And how much do we owe the world to lean in and look unflinchingly at what's actually happening, but also take care of ourselves? Because if all the people who care so deeply about it burn out, then all you're going to have left is Scott Morrisons. You know?

Omar Musa  Yeah, exactly. These are fundamental questions we have to figure out, and we have to figure out the balance as individuals, but individuals who live inextricably in communities. And again, that brings up that idea of community. And I think that in this world that favors kind of a cult of individualism, maybe one of the only ways we can move forward is in our small pockets of community and uplifting at that local level. Of course, advocating for global change. But we ordinary people, and artists, maybe it's that focus on the community and what we can do together that will uplift us and help us survive.

Miranda Metcalf  Just hearing you mention that, I'm just thinking about the experience of what it's like to live day to day, and you're caught up in your own head, and you're worried about going to the grocery store and whether or not you're going to see two people trying to stab each other over some toilet paper, all this kind of thing. And just the release it is just to come into a print studio, and see someone else there who knows you and who greets you warmly. And you can just, you don't even have to talk about the shit that's going on. It's just having someone there who affirms you, it really, for me, it always pulls me out of my own head. I was actually talking to Tim about it the other day. And I said, 'I just want to have a conversation with someone that's not about my problems.' You know? Not that I even have that much to complain about, but it's just kind of this idea of just getting out of your own head by being reminded of someone else's reality. Like, what are you working on? Like, what [do you have] going on? How are your kids? You know, whatever it is, it seems really small, but when you go a couple days without it, you really understand that catharsis when it happens.

Omar Musa  Yeah, definitely. I've found it really exciting and unexpected how willing people have been to help me and how stoked they are that I'm doing printmaking. Because look, I'm not - as it's become obvious - I'm not trained, and I'm not from an institution. And in a weird way, even though I've always been a part of the arts in general, I don't know this world. So I, for instance, don't know about how, or didn't know about, how some forms of art are more lucrative than others. You know what I mean? And that printmaking maybe isn't as big a form, or sort of lucrative, as painting and all that sort of stuff. And so that community aspect of it, I didn't realize how stoked people would be that I chose this medium, as opposed to me trying to go into painting or something. And that's been really cool. And people have popped up out of the woodwork that I didn't know, that were sort of into this or had trained in printmaking. And that's really exciting. And I'm glad that people like that and like Tim exist, because I am bloody useless with science and dropped out of all maths and science in year 10. And so all these different chemicals and things that help create the art, I'm glad that there's places like Megalo that I can come instead of trying to, you know, probably burn my hands off or something trying to do it myself. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, Tim is always keen to talk at the chemistry of printmaking, whether or not anyone else understands it.

Omar Musa  It's hilarious. Because to people who are smart enough to understand it, all their minds work in that way, they're just like, 'Well, you know, it's so obvious. It's just oil and water, you know, they don't mix.' And I'm like, 'Okay, I can understand that. I can understand that much.' But as soon as you go to somebody like, 'Lithographs?' It's just a completely foreign language. I mean, it's so cool. 

Miranda Metcalf  I'm pretty sure it's witchcraft. 

Omar Musa  Yeah, I think so too. And so yeah, I did make some actually with Tim and I thought they were really cool. But you know, after about 30 seconds of him describing what was going on, I was like, 'Okay, I can see that something is going on, and you're helping me with that. But I would never be able to explain this to someone else.'

Miranda Metcalf  Well, in the time that we have left, if you are comfortable with it, would you favor us with a little bit of spoken word for the podcast, if you have something in mind?

Omar Musa  Sure. Alright, so I'm gonna do this poem that's unpublished. I was gonna make an artwork - actually, I started making a woodcut on it for the last exhibition, but I ran out of time. So you know, the listeners can look forward to that. But I guess one of the other things, you know, I've talked about how environmental destruction and mental health are probably the two main themes of what I've been making. But I think lost love and longing are two things I also explore a lot in the work. And so this is a poem kind of based on that longing that doesn't have a name yet, so it goes like this: "The moon is ripe, the sky is credit card gold. My love as deep as your militant indifference, deep as an ocean between us. I'm still trying to find the right words to reach you, sifting through a thousand keys on the palace floor. We sing the same old song apportioning blame, my black eyed angel, precious hurricane. We can recite brand names like a psalm, songs of praise for dollars that evaporate in your palm. But have we ever seen God's face? Ever bathed in her profane grace? Because this signal keeps fucking up. Potholes where we once played double dutch. So you told me, write a new story. You who was never mine. So I'll try to speak the unspeakable and turn water into wine."

Miranda Metcalf  Beautiful. Thank you. 

Omar Musa  Thank you.

Miranda Metcalf  I got goose bumps. That was really beautiful, thank you. 

Omar Musa  Yeah, just a short one. So yeah, I mean, it's exciting to combine the words and the images. Like, I found that that was my entry point. It was a little bit too scary to just go straight into being like, 'Okay, here it is, I'm also the artist now.' It seemed to make sense to kind of incorporate that into the whole process. Just as with my novel writing, I used poetry as the access point to prose, I kind of did that with this as well. And then, just as... like the whole world, there are melting borders sort of between nations. And very supple borders between communities as we fracture and recreate and create new communities online and based on political ideologies, or interests as opposed to nationality and race and gender, these sort of things. I think it's a really cool thing to do that with the arts as well, to break down these perceived kind of borders and barriers between art forms. And I don't know if that's a real basic thing to say, because maybe these are conversations that are had in the visual arts all the time. But for me, from a personal point of view and perspective, that's what I've enjoyed most about this process and I'm excited to see where it goes in the future.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, we're so happy - I speak for the printmaking community - we're so happy that you've joined us, Omar, and you're making such beautiful work, and really being an amazing voice within our communities. So thank you so much for sitting down with me. This was such a fun chat. 

Omar Musa  No problem, yeah. This was great. 

Miranda Metcalf  This was really, really good. And before we totally sign off, where can people find you, see your work, see your woodcuts, find more of your writing?

Omar Musa  You can find me on Facebook @omarmusaqbn, and my Instagram is actually probably the most active social media I've got, which is @omarbinmusa. And yeah, I'm always putting up my new work on there. And I've got a Big Cartel where people can buy stuff, but it's not about that for me at the moment. So yeah, just follow me on Instagram. That's probably the best way.

Miranda Metcalf  Definitely, I will put links to all of that. So thank you so much again. 

Omar Musa  Thank you. 

Miranda Metcalf  Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again next week when my guest will be Raj Bunnag. Raj makes the most unbelievably detailed large scale woodcuts about the war on drugs. We'll talk the politics of narcotics, the joy and the pain of travel, his experience growing up on the East Coast as the child of Thai immigrants, and why he'll take on at times a year long printmaking project. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help from Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you next week.