Justin Hinder is a painter whose work deals with popular culture, premonitions and the supernatural, from a uniquely Australian perspective. Recently his paintings have depicted his diagnosis and treatment of cancer, while dealing with temporary housing after separating from his long term partner and estranged from his family.

Justin met Melissa Loughnan over ten years ago where they worked together at Utopian Slumps. They recently came together for an online fundraising exhibition of Justin’s work with proceeds funding his recovery and rehabilitation, including a new home. Melissa and Justin met to reflect on this wild journey.

ML: We first met in 2010 at Utopian Slumps when you were in a corporate career and collecting art. What inspired you to leave your job and start making art? How did it all happen?

JH: I’ve always been interested in art but I didn’t think it was a viable career or something that I was necessarily good at. Once I started working at Utopian Slumps I received a lot of encouragement from Helen Hughes and yourself - I think becoming part of the community and engaging with art shows really cemented my interest. Being in that arena it became evident that I had an artistic sensibility that went beyond appreciation. I guess being nurtured in this environment was really formative for me in accepting that aspect of myself. You go through life and being an artist wasn’t really in my mind; I started in fashion and didn’t really see art as an acceptable career path.

ML: I guess in the arts it’s like ‘well how are you going to make money? How are you going to survive?’ There’s a level of uncertainty that can discourage you from pursuing the field.

JH: I think so. I remember people saying ‘You should make art’ but thinking of myself as an observer and not an actual maker. I built my confidence from interning at Utopian Slumps and then doing that show at Rear View. I was meant to sit the show one day and I turned up and Paul Wotherspoon [the director] said “oh my god you’re the first person who has got us in the Age.” I didn’t even know that my show had been reviewed. So I went to Woolworths on Smith Street and got the paper and there was a review of my show!

ML: So by that point you had started making art?

JH: Yes, that was my first solo. I had collated a bunch of images on an iPad that I was given for Christmas from my then partner Troy and I would screenshot things. All of those images that I had collated over, say, a six month period came together in a series of collages. It was interesting because that show, on reflection, was quite homoerotic.

ML: Was that what was written about in the Age?

JH: Yeah. It wasn’t really my intent but that’s what came through and I guess looking at it, it kind of was (laughs). The show included a load of images of ‘bears’, which reminded me of Troy, intermixed with pop culture imagery. The biggest theme that I wanted to explore with that show was the collation of seemingly random images, the internet, the information age, but also, I had such a hatred for the colour yellow and then I realised that I did like yellow; I almost saw yellow as this symbol of who I really was and my process of accepting that. The towel used in the show was one of Troy’s towels, which helped me to accept my love of yellow - when we started dating I would use these yellow towels at his home. It was something that was really absurd to me; like I was falling in love with a person and a colour simultaneously and that was why the towel and the ‘bears’ became a part of the installation. There was a yellow wall, which made the colour more consuming, and the show came together almost like a self portrait.

ML: So it sort of became a personal documentation of your relationship.

JH: Exactly, and it speaks to how my practice has unfolded. Like Holy Ghost, for example, is sort of quasi-autobiographical. I do use myself as a vehicle but not necessarily in an overt or obvious way.

ML: Let’s talk about Holy Ghost a bit more. The series was about your Catholic guilt, from the perspective of a school girl. Obviously there’s a bit of autobiography in this story, and a bit of fiction as well. Can you tell me about how the story unfolds through the works, and where the fact and fiction comes in?

JH: Sure. People often comment on my use of a strong female protagonist within my painting or writing projects. Before I did my residency at Town Hall Gallery I skirted around females and femininity. I didn’t really feel that it was my place to make work predominantly female-led, but I’ve always been more attracted to the female protagonist. Like in the music I listen to, I prefer a female vocal over a male vocal, and the same in film. But when I was doing this residency Ilona Nelson was in the next room and she had made an installation which was about her in the domestic space as a mother - you know doing dishes, aprons, laundry, preparing breakfast and all those kinds of things - and in a way I saw this crossover. My work at this point had all been about domestic settings and human interaction. Walking through that installation space and into my studio in the gallery every day got me even more interested in the female protagonist. I would say that moment of realisation was a massive turning point for me and my work.

Holy Ghost is an alternate-reality version of myself if I was born female. I was supposed to go to boarding school. I didn’t go, but still went to a Catholic private school. I wanted to utilise these other alternate possibilities and present my story from a step back. For this suite of paintings if I’d used a male in that body of work it would have opened up too many ideas about the Catholic Church and peodophilia and molestation, and that wasn’t what the work was about. It was about being brought up Catholoic and the idea that God, or someone, is always watching. The spaces within the paintings are quite open and in some of the works the figures are quite small, so in some ways I was giving this sense of someone always watching over you from different perspectives. That’s what Catholic guilt is all about and follows on now in the modern age with CCTV and phone tracking etcetera, without the religious connotations.

ML: And can you remind me what happens at the end of the series? What’s the crescendo of the story?

JH: It’s called The Tomb/Charon’s obol. I grew up in a time when Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides came out so I had this weird romanticism about premature or young death. As a teenager going through self discovery things are a bit more melodramatic with all the hormones. That painting is representative not of a true death but of transcending from childhood into adulthood, the loss of innocence and becoming aware of sexuality. You’re cutting off your naivety and childhood innocence and moving into this next stage. In my case this was becoming aware of being gay against what I was initially led to believe my life would look like.

ML: Let’s go back to you starting out as an artist. Which other artists’ practices do you think were most inspirational to your beginnings? Being self-taught, is there anything foundational?

I’ve been fortunate that people I admire have come forth and offered not only their thoughts, feedback and encouragement on my work but have also been really open about their practices. Artists like Brent Harris, Lou Hubbard, John Meade, Prudence Flint, Katherine Hattam and Heidi Yardley have all been super encouraging, to name a few. I’ve learnt a lot through the generosity of their time. I feel like I’ve almost earned a degree through these interactions!

ML: How did your project with Sarah crowEST, Heaven-sent crumbs at Utopian Slumps, come about?

JH: I think I initiated the project because she was making her ‘Mound activity’ series.

ML: So did you see those works and make a connection to your Picnic at Hanging Rock paintings?

JH: Yes. People see my Picnic at Hanging Rock works as abstractions, but I see them more as landscapes. I’d always been really interested in the Heide School and traditional Australian artists like Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan. For Heaven-sent crumbs I wanted to make landscapes that were almost aura-like. Each painting was titled from a direct quote from the novel, nodding to ideas of the school girl trope but also to the broader themes of mystery, gothic romance, the idea of people being somewhere that they shouldn’t be, as well as the sacredness of the area to the indigenous community. The show also allowed me to create a palette. Future works don’t really move much beyond the palette used in this show.

ML: Your ochres and whites and yellows and burnt earth colours keep coming back.

JH: Yeah, that’s the thing - it allowed me to make work and create material that was about the Australian palette and also experiment with how these colours work together in new, abstract forms. It’s having that passion for Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan and all those artists, so those works were a way to pay homage, or create an ‘after…’ this person. Going back to what we were talking about before about artists that inspire me, I would say that Arthur Boyd’s Bride series is probably one of my biggest influences.

ML: I can see that. I could name so many of your works where I can see that connection.

JH: And I think that it’s quasi-unpopular to have that aesthetic. But that show was another turning point, it was really well received. And it got another review in the Age, which was super encouraging.

ML: That was one of your major series, and obviously there was Holy Ghost. When did Grande Finale happen? Can you tell me more about that series?

JH: At around that time I was encouraged to apply for Masters at VCA without doing undergrad, but I was also getting courted by This is No Fantasy. I was at a kind of crossroads - do I do both, do I do one, what do I do? I felt like it was cool to get into masters but it was probably a bit premature and that there was way more to explore within my practice before doing something like that. I feared that in doing a degree I’d maybe lose a bit of the naivety or outsider aspect of my practice. I felt like it was proving myself a bit too much if I did go into Masters, and that my practice needed more room, so I decided to go with This is No Fantasy.

At that time I didn’t want to pinpoint my works into one particular storyline or narrative so I felt that the best option was to develop a bunch of separate narratives, but also manipulate these during the install process. This is something that I learnt from you, about conversations within art and spaces. Because I write as well I’m interested in visual storytelling and how it can be manipulated or used to demonstrate a variety of points. There were lots of paintings which were just happy - like two girls walking along a windy mountain and everything’s flying in the air, but then that would be juxtaposed with a painting of a funerary urn and snapshot of a broken family.

Grande Finale was about the rites of passage in life. I used to work in allied health consultancy and I found that I was more interested in people’s stories than the actual work - the adversity that people go through and how they overcome that. So Grande Finale formed a combination of things that I was interested in, stories that were funny, or a bit dark, or romantic, all put together. ML: Going on from that, let’s talk about Vacation. I felt like that series had a lot of crossover with Grande Finale.

JH: Oh 100%.

ML: I remember one of my favourite works was the drawing with the girl with her top off, hands in the air in the convertible [laughs]. Can you tell me a bit more about your Vacation series?

JH: Vacation started from a conversation with Iain Dean, a Perth-based artist. We were showing at the same gallery and built a friendship where we’d exchange works and do bits and pieces for each other. We had this weird little penpal situation going on. Charlotte Cornish invited me to have a show at The Honeymoon Suite and I spoke to her about doing it with Iain. My concept was: as an artist you don’t really have time to go on holiday, you’re working jobs to pay your bills all the time but also there’s the flip side where if an artist does go on vacation you try to make time to continue to make work. There’s this weird conflict between making work/not making work/down time. As an artist you often have to make work while having a full time job, or a few part time jobs, so I guess the entry point was a tongue-in-cheek look at vacationing as an artist - it’s not really ever going to happen!

We were both interested in drawing as the foundation of an idea - it’s easy to travel and draw. We didn’t talk much while we made the actual work, we sent texts, images and videos prior, but we didn’t interact during this time. For me, when I was going on vacation I’d go somewhere like the Mornington Peninsula, so I based my paintings on a wild weekend there. There was also a collaborative charcoal wall drawing of a scene in an Italian restaurant . There were different scenarios going on like a wife drinking and her husband a bit exhausted, hunched back in his chair; we had wine bottles drawn across the doorways as well as plants and a toilet sign which led to a door that didn’t go anywhere. We really played with the space and had a sense of humour within that. My drawings seemed to be more figurative and Iain’s were of objects - one of my favourites of his was a box of Xanax. The works weren’t made alongside each other but actually went together so well.

ML: So can you tell me about the current paintings you’re working on? I’ve seen some pieces that relate to your recent diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Are they going to culminate in your next series?

JH: They are. No one ever made assumptions that my past works were about me, although you could maybe tell with some of them. Going through something like cancer, I was thinking ‘I’m an artist and I’m making work about life, I should document this’. When I was diagnosed I was originally not going to make it a publicly known thing. You know, there’s an internet version and there’s the real version - there’s information about my life and career online and there’s things that I keep just with my close loved ones, but I felt like going through something like this, losing an ear and having twice-daily radiation for six weeks - and with cancer being such a common yet almost taboo subject, it was important to make work about that experience. I surprised myself with my resilience, going through something like this you have no option. It reminds me of a quote that a curator sent me about a soldier being told he’s so brave from leading an army into battle, and he responds that he just tells himself to do it, he has his battalion’s support and so he is no braver than anyone else.

ML: It’s been so much.

JH: Totally, and it’s affected so much. It’s interesting that I was so put off by the story of Van Gogh’s ear, and that I’ve now lost my ear, at least until I’m able to have reconstructive surgery. It’s furthered my interest in ideas like premonitions and ghosts. I think there was too much to not make work about it. My next show is at Oigall Projects and really explores this theme.

ML: Did the break up with Troy come into the series as well? Obviously there’s a progression in your life where you’ve gone from living with your partner to being independent again, while dealing with cancer.

JH: With this next show I really focus on myself, which is very new for me, but I think it’s been the best way for me to process my recent experiences. The show will comprise self-portraits and still lifes. I’ve gone from using iconography suggestive of me to flat out making work where I am the only figure present, which speaks volumes of my current journey.

ML: You need to be able to process this wild life changing experience.

JH: Yeah. It’s nice that I feel so much better than I did before my operations. I can’t hear as well as I used to. I’ve lost an ear, but that will come back. But there’s things like… music sounds a little different. So I might be really familiar with a song and then be like, wait - that doesn’t sound the same.

I think it’s something like every four minutes that someone gets told they have cancer. Particularly as Australians, cancer is such a huge part of our life because skin cancers and melanomas are so common, and I felt like it was important for me to make work about that subject. I mean, it’s daunting.

ML: Totally. Which relates to what we’ve been working on together, an online fundraising exhibition, Epilogue. We documented a number of your paintings and works on paper from 2013 to present day, and made them available for sale online so that the proceeds could fund your cancer treatment and recovery. How are you feeling since this project, with the support that you’ve received for yourself and your work? Has it renewed your sense of energy for the future and for your practice?

JH: 100%. My last show was Holy Ghost, and I was unwell during that time and leading into it, so it’s nice to come out the other end and see that there’s still interest in my work and so much support. We live in such a time, particularly through Covid, where it’s so hard to feel like you’re part of a community, or that people are there. So I think seeing that response and that support gave me a new revitalisation. It definitely does give you a sense of purpose because you can see that there’s an interest in your work and that people want more.

ML: And people love you clearly, which must make you feel so heartened amidst all of this.

JH: Exactly. You know, when you’re going through such a massive thing; I mean I was with someone for ten years and then that ended. So to see so much encouragement, support and love; people offering help - all the things that have come out of it, it has been really nice.

ML: A real bringing together of your community.

JH: Yeah - it’s not like I had a loss of faith in that but I think just being the kind of person that I am, I’m quite independent and don’t ask for help and don’t rely on others for anything - it was nice to experience this. It’s been awesome and really kept me going.