A chat with Miso

By Andy Summons. First published in Paper Sea Quarterly Vol. 1, Iss. 4.

A conversation with Melbourne artist, Miso, who follows her creative inspiration across any media that strike her interest, which has most recently led her to creating homemade tattoos as part of her art practice.

The last time I visited Miso’s studio in the heart of Melbourne’s city, I left with a homemade tattoo. It is simple, in Miso’s beautiful style and she hopes that one day I will regret it. Miso enjoys the tension between the permanence of the artwork and the idea that one day all the people she tattoos may grow to regret their personal, permanent artwork. I am sure I won’t but I will reassess in thirty years. 

At the time Miso tattooed me, she had not established how tattooing sat with her craft and so in place of payment she traded tattoos for skills, services and goods. For example, she is hoping to trade a tattoo for a lesson on how to weld. However, a bottle of whisky, a home-cooked meal or a few beers and some good stories are sufficient remuneration. Miso is an artist who enjoys the medium of tattooing, as opposed to being solely a tattoo artist, which means that she is less willing to compromise her art and vision of an artwork for a client’s needs. For this reason, as well as a self- deprecating modesty in her tattooing abilities, Miso has predominantly restricted her client base to friends.

I sat with Miso on a Wednesday night in her corner studio. The room was flooded with gentle light from the overcast sky and the sound of post peak hour city traffic interspersed with yelling and the occasional clack of a skateboard filtered up through her balcony windows. Our conversation turned to interviews and how they so often re-tread and trample familiar ground. Discussing an artist’s inspirations, current projects, and their first memory of painting/ drawing/ answering vapid interview questions and I laughed in spite of my preparation. 

Every interview I’d read about Miso described her as a street artist but her latest project seemed so far removed from her work installed around Melbourne’s tangle of laneways that it made me wonder about the title. She is working on a series of pin-pricked maps of remembered journeys created by poking pin-holes through thick white paper, so I wanted to clarify how Miso identified herself as an artist. 

‘Just don’t ask me to describe my art,’ Miso said with a straight look, ‘I really hate describing my work. I find it so hard. I’ve already made it, so I don’t feel like I need to describe it in words too. Maybe if I rely on words to describe works, I will become lazier when it comes to putting everything I need into the actual art work.’ 

Miso is an impressively prolific street artist but she finds that title to be limiting and I learned that it does not nearly adequately describe the breadth of her creative interests and expertise. In the first five minutes of conversation Miso spoke with infectious passion about creating art in the media of embroidery, drawing, paper-cuts, tattooing, pin-prick works and diverse street art works. Miso looked a little perplexed when I asked about the path that led her from the apparent extremes in the traditions of embroidering to tattooing. 

‘I was doing a lot of embroidery for a show at the same time that I took up tattooing. I have a steady hand from all the paper-cut work I have done and I saw tattooing as simply putting ink at the end of the embroidery needle.’ 

It was a self-assured approach to creativity and it dawned on me why it may be frustrating being labelled as a street artist. Miso decided to study philosophy at Melbourne University instead of studying art at the esteemed Victorian College of the Arts. 

Unbound by whatever barriers there may appear to be between different media I put it to Miso that being free of an art school background may have facilitated such a free-flowing creativity between historically opposed media. Miso describes her philosophy degree as ‘the ultimate dinner party degree’ but deeply appreciates the wealth of benefits it has offered her. 

‘Studying philosophy made me want to travel and see and do whatever I wanted. I’m so grateful that I did all that. Studying philosophy made me really excited to just make my art practice work and come to my studio between classes and run my own thing independently. I did everything I needed to do to make sure I could draw all day, on my own terms. Being outside of art school let me really enjoy doing things like creating work on the streets. It is something totally divorced from money and permission let alone grades, adding to the dialogue of a city, giving back to the city.’ 

It was a period of prolific creativity and intense work. The frustrations that come with the temporary nature of some of her work led Miso to explore tattooing. 

‘At the time I started tattooing I felt that all of my work was very ephemeral. There were installations that would be over in a month’s time and shows that people would see and that work would never be together again. I was making heaps of street art and a lot of it was being destroyed. Creating a tattoo was an appealing balance to all that. It took me about two years of tattooing as a quiet hobby to even begin showing it to people as a part of my art practice. I knew that if I followed my feet it would come together but I didn’t want to force it.’ 

It took some time for Miso to establish exactly how tattooing fit in with her creative practice. It was important for her to explore the medium of tattooing but not let it interfere with her exhibitions or devalue her other work. Being able to offer her friends affordable artworks was really appealing. 

‘My work costs quite a bit of money now and I am mainly tattooing friends, young people who can’t really afford my other work. Tattooing is a really cool way to engage with art, to sit together and draw an artwork just for skin, something that is right and special to that person alone. I enjoy the handmade aspect of stick and poke tattooing and the punk gesture of homemade tattoos too; it’s low-fi. But it’s also a very intimate thing and implies a certain trust and that is why I only tattoo friends. It can be really difficult to meet halfway on an image and make it personal and perfect for them while still fitting with my practice.’

Before studying philosophy, Miso had another strong source of inspiration and one that has endured and remains today - punk music. As a teenager, she spent entire weekends at punk gigs, taking aboard the vehement independence expounded by punk culture and it was that independence that led Miso to a hands- on creativity.

‘I started doing graffiti when I was fourteen. I was making my own clothes and all that. Punk is all about independence and not relying on anyone else and I still kind of like to live like that.’

Miso’s latest exhibition is a paper cut series of memory maps of past journeys, documented by pushing and hammering a thick needle through paper. Working in this particular medium began as practice for tattooing and quickly became a way to show the disparity between remembered journeys and the reality of the actual streets that she walked on her travels.

‘I have been working a lot lately with pin-pricks, and I think that medium is beautiful because I’m not adding anything to the piece of paper only carving away from it and I find that so satisfying. The technique in this work is similar to tattooing and it’s exciting seeing the dichotomy between the two forms. One is so white, clean and disciplined. The other is a messy process of black ink on sweaty skin and has a life of stretching, aging and sagging. They are so precise and such a similar process in a way. Working white on white means that I can only use form to bring the work to life, the severity and constraints of this medium have pushed me to create things I never expected to make because I cannot rely on any of my old drawing devices.’

Seafarers have used the stars for navigation for centuries, I remember staring at the Milky Way as a kid and wondering how the hell they saw directions in that mess. Miso’s reading of their role is a more poetic interpretation of memory and physical space.

‘My work with constellations is about the physical embodiment of dreaming and memory, physical city space and constellations as something much bigger than us. I enjoy taking an idea that is so abstract and giving it a physical embodiment on the human body.’

It is an arresting idea that a childhood intrigue into punk music can lead to a prolific, self-sustaining and apparently perpetual creativity. Her artistic process is unbound by the pigeonhole of media and provoked by experimentation, philosophical journeying, travel and a desire to study what to draw and not how to draw. Miso’s creativity is inspiring and will be with me forever, whether I like it or not.

www.m-i-s-o.com