Meet Harry from Loki Patera
Name, pronouns and star sign?
Harry, he/him but I’m also comfortable with they/them, and I'm an ARIES.
Where did you grow up, and where do you live now?
I grew up in Singapore from when I was seven until the end of high school, but also partly in the US and Australia. I currently live on Garigal Country (north of Sydney) in a little granny flat next to the bush, with my partner Henry.
How has your upbringing shaped your creative practice?
The main creative influence in my early years was my mother, who is also an artist, and art/making was always something we did at home. It became such an integral part of how I experience and interact with the world. She still fills me with so much inspiration and curiosity about the natural world and how spirit is the connective muck of nature. I feel grateful that I learnt about craft informally but intimately, which really helped me become critical of the bullshit conceptual stuff later in uni.
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During my formative teen years, we lived in a house surrounded by jungle, and had many co-habitants including long-tailed macaques, all sorts of snakes, frogs, geckos, monitor lizards, hornbills etc. Inside and outside were always buzzing with life and natural curiosities, and the surrounding jungle was dense with mystery. I think this has forever imprinted me with the instinct to explore natural phenomena and forms.
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How did you and Hugo (your business partner) meet?
Hugo and I met at my sister’s ceramic exhibition at COFA a few years ago. He approached me because he liked my pink suede jacket and we hit it off as friends straight away, and then later started working together creatively.
What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
This is a big question! It's always evolving and changing, but one thing that has always captivated me (albeit in various forms) is the feeling of transcendence. I don’t mean this in a spirit-body are separate kind of way. I mean, when I feel so integrated into an ecology, or so humbled by the complexity of life, or transported into another way of thinking/being, that the programming of western capitalist logic is shed and I feel the most human and connected to everything around me.
I guess that is the work of our time, because everyone has the inherent capacity to be connected and creative, we are just trapped (in varying degrees of intensity) within a suppressive system that we never consented to.
What turns you off?
Feeling disempowered by economics and that the only way to survive as an artist is to commodify my dreams.
What’s your dream collaboration?
I think my dream collaboration is living in a community on the land with all my best friends. I’m blessed to have people in my life that are so curious about imagining new ways of being and experimenting with what it means to be on Earth, to be human. I know that if we had the collective space-time to explore this we would all come up with the wackiest things, and that it would be so heightened by a sense of shared experience. Can we all just make the time???
If your label/art was a…
… taste?
Like a smoked fruit flavour? Woody, resinous, but caramelized and fresh as well.
… celebrity?
Queen Boudica (aspirational).
… hairstyle?
‘Astral Personne’ by Remedios Varo.
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… flower?
Black bat flower (Tacca chantrieri) of course!! These are the guardians at my front door.
… place?
It already is! Loki Patera gets its namesake from a lava lake on one of Jupiter’s moons Io.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
I have no idea, but I like this poem by Wendell Berry that my friend shared with me a few years ago.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever given?
The best advice I would give right now is: Allow moments of nothingness to exist in your day. Doing ‘nothing’ is so important to be able to hear your own creative voice and allow things to bubble up from the subconscious.