Tanya Cunnington – Birdbath Collaboration

You and your partner Bewabon Shilling, founded a local art initiative called Birdbath Collaboration in 2010. Can you talk to us a bit about how it came about and what it’s doing now?

Definitely! I had to think about this -why did we start the Birdbath Collaboration? -and I think there was a TV show on called The Next Great Art Star, or some reality show like that. And we would watch it every week, and they would give you different projects to complete and both of us painters, we’d be like,”oh I would have done this” or, “no, no I would have done that” and I feel like perhaps we were just at a point in our artistic careers where we needed a little bit more stimulation.

It’s so easy to get stuck and you don’t even realize you’re stuck because you don’t think of it as being stuck, but, maybe you’re using the same three colors or, you’re doing the same placing on the canvas all the time.

So when we started talking about “oh, I would have done it differently”, we thought, “well, why don’t we?” because to say that we can’t make a sculpture – just because we’re two painters – maybe we can try our hand at sculpting. And that’s really how it started. I think we did a couple of paintings.

How it works is one of us will sketch it out – whoever has the initial idea sketches it – and then we just go from there painting lines. There’s a natural point in a painting where you take a moment, you step back, then you look at it and you decide what to do next.

And it’s at that point that the second person comes in. It’s been fantastic in that it’s broken both of us out of our bubbles a bit. He uses colours I would never use and he places things where I would never think to put them, but we have so much respect for each other as artists that I think we allow each other that freedom.