Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2023 - Student interview - 02. Audrey Napper

AUDREY NAPPER: Hello. My name is Audrey Napper. And I studied visual arts at Figtree High School. So my artwork Ce n'est pas une maison de poupée is French. And it means, 'It's not a doll house.'

So my original idea for my artwork was focusing on my family background as well as the multiculturalism of Australia. Having grown up in America and having family from France, and Australia, America, and all over the world, I've travelled quite a lot and got to experience all different cultures and noticed how multicultural Australia is. So I wanted to combine all of that together to create the sculpture I made.

When I first started my artwork, I actually didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn't really good at painting or drawing. But I wanted to focus on sculpture and creating something. When making my artwork, I looked at artists such as Joshua Smith, who's a miniature artist. He focuses on the rust and decay of urban spaces and the overlooked aspects, which I really wanted to include in my artwork, showing that houses are not so perfect. There are quite a lot of things people overlook, such as rust and decay. So I really wanted to include that.

And then I also looked at Michael MacMillan, who focuses on sculpture and industrial elements. So I wanted to look at that as well and the structure he uses to create his houses.

It was a lot of trial and error. I did start off wanting to make 3 individual-- like, 3 separate houses. And then later realised it was going to take way too long to involve all of that detail. So then I decided to put it all together, which, I guess, in a way, it made my concept even better, I guess, showing the multiculturalism of Australia by putting them all together and focusing on the townhouses that you see in Redfern in Sydney.

To make my body of work, it was all found materials that I then repurposed. So it was a lot of old wood, metal, lots of old plastic as well, like sushi trays. The clear plastic, I used those for the windows. There's an old barbecue grill that I found that I used for the fence. Bubble tea straws. So all of it was just found material that I had laying around that I reused. I aged them as well, cut them, and made them fit my artwork.

I wanted it to be industrial as well. I didn't want it to be super perfect. And I wanted to show that it had been lived in, showing the rust and the decay as well. So when I first started planning my artwork, I went to Sydney quite a lot, looking at all the townhouses there, which I wanted to focus on, how everyone lives so close together yet they show the different cultures through their houses, through small things.

So for instance, the colour of the house, like the Australian house is yellow and green, or the French house with the terracotta roof, and the American house, the last one with the fire escape. It was really hard to keep everything together. So it was a lot of different glues I had to use, different nails. Because of the materials, some of them didn't stick together, and also making sure the glue wasn't shown on the artwork as well. So adding rust over top of things or redoing things quite a few times to make sure that it all came together without showing the glue and how it had been stuck together.

So I wanted to attach the sculpture to the wall so I could show the roots of the house as well. Underneath, I added heaps of industrial elements like pipes, wood, metal as well, just to show like if the house had been lifted off the floor. That would be the roots of the ground.

If there's any advice I could give to you guys, it would be find something that is personal to you and something that you connect with. For me, it was my family, which I then used to explore my family background to make this sculpture.

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