(Left to right) Little Design Horse, Clare Martin, Tin&Ed,
Leif Podhajsky, Beastman and the Semi-Permanent goodies
A few weeks ago, it was Perth’s turn for the Semi-Permanent conference, and while it is significantly smaller than the eastern states’ incarnation, it is still worth getting along to if you are interested in creative events. This year it was held in The Bakery (which looked surprisingly similar considering it had been closed for renovations for so long...). It wasn’t the best venue for a conference because the seats were not very comfortable and they weren’t tiered meaning we had to peer between people’s heads to see the pictures. First up was Little Design Horse who told about the jetsetting life of a textile designer and their latest venture of Future Shelter. I was quite jealous of all their machines including the laser cutter, the silkscreen printer and the screenprint drying machine - I was imagining how many hours I could save if I didn’t have to iron my prints to heat set them! Next was Clare Martin, a photographer who showed some of her photos, mostly of people from ‘ghetto’ areas in Canada and America who were often drug addicts – some of these images were quite confronting. After a short break came Leif Podhajsky, a graphic designer with some unusual views. He had some techniques which seemed a little dodgy e.g. using images from porn websites or scanned in from old magazines without permission and then altering them. After an extremely short lunchbreak (too short to get any lunch as we found out when we got back and the next speaker had already started!) was Beastman, an artist who does a lot of grafitti type work i.e. painting on walls. I liked his idea of getting a group of artist friends together and organising an exhibition to promote all of them. That’s something I’d like to do, if only I knew enough artists! Lastly were Tin&Ed who seem to have got some pretty good opportunities to do some interesting work. Overall, it was a good day to hear about how other creative people work and we came away with a Semi-Permanent book, bag and some posters! Yay for free stuff!
