CREATURE Interview with Kyo Maclear

ORION Magazine, September 2022

KM: Hi Shaun. First, let me say what a delight it was to spend time with your beautiful book. Can you talk about the origins of Creature? Where do you begin when you start a new work? What did the title of the book invite or incite for you?

Books for me are a bit like planets. Initially, there’s a lot of gas and dust floating around in space – different ideas, sketches, notes – and through some gravity of their own these things gather into something with mass, density and (if lucky) some interesting life and meaning. It’s a process that takes about five to ten years. Lots of planets are always forming in my mind or sketchbooks, but only occasionally do they promise to be something substantial, at least one that someone else might want to look at.

I’d long been wanting to do something broadly retrospective and non-fiction, which shows a bit more of artistic process and experimentation. Back in 2010, I was encouraged by a friend to self-publish a small book of sketchbook extracts called ‘The Bird King’, so-called because I tend to draw birds often. I did not think this would find much audience, but it ended up being very popular, especially among other artists and students. I always wanted to follow that up with something a bit more considered, which included finished paintings as much as sketches. For many years my working title for this was ‘Untold Tales’, gathering singular illustrations that inspire readers to create their own stories.

After more than 25 years of freelance writing and illustration, you can imagine I have plenty of unpublished material: orphans and widows of projects never completed for one reason or another, experimental work, developmental sketches for books and film, and lots of personal pieces created for my own interest. It’s the underwater iceberg that supports that small part exhibited or published above sea level. That tip never really tells the whole creative story though, being more in the service of a particular narrative or brief. Anyone with an interest in art always wants to look a bit deeper, whether out of curiosity or professional interest.

The problem is that it’s all a bit random and incoherent. Especially a lot of early career stuff, with no unifying vision, theme or style, something I’ve tended to avoid, not wanting to pigeon-hole myself. Self-curating is also quite tricky at the best of times. Other people can often be better at recognising patterns in an artist’s work, being more objective. They will talk about a recognisable styles, themes and context that the artist doesn’t notice. But I also find this can miss some deeper current, and lack a real understanding of private warts-and-all studio practice, which is by nature hidden, unexhibited, and complex. Hearing what other artists make of their own work is always something I find personally interesting, for better or worse, and I wanted to try doing the same. It meant I really had to step back from the studio table and look critically at everything, including work from childhood and adolescence. The simplest thing that stood out was the prevalence of creatures. Lots of changes of style and meaning, but more often than not a creature somewhere, either a familiar animal or an imaginary one, usually in a suburban landscape.

Going back to beginnings, real beginnings, one drawing I did around the age of three shows a dinosaur family: two parents and an unborn foetus. This picture is reproduced at the beginning of the book, as I was struck by how honest and earnest it looks, and that I still remember drawing it, one of the few memories I have of that time. I love how purposeless it is too, drawing at its most essential, just wanting to see what something looks like as it moves from your head onto paper. That impulse was the guiding principle in making a selection, as well as adding some new pieces: just this very basic urge to draw fictional creatures. And then to write about them a little, try to make sense of what they might all mean.

KM: Was there a creaturely story or film you enjoyed growing up that left a lasting imprint?

Oh, so many. Film and TV were essentially my main art gallery, growing up in what was then outer suburban Perth in Western Australia, not exactly the cultural centre of the world. That thin bit of wire catching airwaves from a hot, clay-tile roof was in hindsight probably the key conduit to an artistic life. Not to mention the gateway drug to harder stuff like art and literature. I don’t think we should ever underestimate the extent to which pop culture provides a valuable entry point into other areas of creativity, theory, criticism and rich intellectual life. Especially for kids. 

I was born in 1974, and throughout the late ‘70s and ‘80s there was a wave of inventive science fiction and fantasy movies and TV, perhaps coinciding with a blossoming special effects industry. Not always great, but I think more stylistically and conceptually diverse – by which I mean more experimental and random – than much of what I see now, which seems little more than CG reworkings of concepts from this era: Star Wars, ET, Close Encounters, Alien, Mad Max, The Dark Crystal, Bladerunner, Brazil. Genuinely other-worldly visions, and many more of questionable production quality, but even the bad ones were at least pretty mind-bending. All kids of my place and generation grew up on this, it informed our schoolyard language and play. And something about the model and matt-painted construction of these films made them feel very accessible, nicely imperfect. As if we could write, draw and build things like that ourselves.

One early experience I write about in the book was watching ‘The Beast from 20,000 fathoms’ with my dad, a late-night ‘creature feature’ on our old black and white, wood-veneer TV. This was maybe the first time I heard the word ‘creature’, which opened up some vast room in my mind, where any kind of entity might be possible. You only needed to call something a ‘creature’, and that was sufficient, like an open question, fully formed. You didn’t need to know a thing’s name, where it came from, what it meant, what it was for. That simple idea, with the handle of that clear and nebulous word ‘creature’, is something that still inspires me to write and draw. As a concept I guess it expanded as a teenager, with a greater realisation than humans are also strange creatures, that it’s all pretty relative.

To a large extent, we are also the most imaginary of all creatures. That is, we imagine our identities, through stories and images, we built a picture of who we are in our minds, and this may or may not chime with reality. I think it also means we fall a little out of step with nature, creating all sorts of complications and anxieties. Which of course provides very rich material for writing and painting.

KM: The worlds you build for your creatures feel very specific yet often like a mixture of places, or like everyday places that have been eerily transfigured. Where do these worlds come from? What did you grow up surrounded by or gazing at? Or, put another way, how were the shapes you make shaped?

I think it all comes from my local suburban environment, around the two cities where I have lived, Perth and Melbourne. In some cases, bits of my local neighbourhood are integrated directly into paintings: the image of a huge water buffalo conversing with a child comes from a laneway near my home which has a huge, shaggy-animal-shaped palm tree next to it. I would see it in the dark while taking my baby son out for a night stroll, a time when familiar objects become stranger, seem so much bigger.

In fact, this kind of local misperception, or re-perception, is something I’ve come to appreciate as very important in my work. As a painter, I’m mostly drawn to straight landscape paintings of places I know well, just sitting in front of a park or street and drawing what I see. The interesting thing about that process, especially involving a deeply familiar subject, is that objects become strange as I draw them. I come to appreciate that all the things I’m used to recognising, labelling, bestowing with meaning and function, are actually deeply mysterious phenomena. A tree is not just a tree, it’s this strange, living, semi-aerial mass connected to everything around it by invisible threads. A puddle is not just a puddle, it’s a uniquely shaped liquid mirror of a hundred different colours, always changing. A car is a weird beetle-like thing that human animals can peel open and routinely resurrect from death. This always happens when I draw or write observationally. I begin to feel like an alien anthropologist, or maybe a very young child, studying every line, shape, texture and colour as if you’ve never seen it before.

For me, this is what drawing and painting is really about, beyond making nice pictures. It’s a deeper appreciation of things you thought you already knew. The act of copying things with such simple, slow and resistant materials like pencils and paint forces you to do this. It compels you to sit and stare for an unusually long time, leading to unusual thoughts, a search for poetic connections, similarities, metaphors. It becomes very easy then to move between real and fictional worlds, to introduce unseen creatures or characters. It’s as if by drawing the real world, you loosen all the tight knots of meaning there, and can sew in a whole bunch of new ones, or even re-knit the whole thing as something else. I suppose writing is the same, you are always picking things apart, into strangeness, into words, and stitching the world back together in new, speculative ways.

KM: The wonderful Cree-Métis author-illustrator Julie Flett told me she usually begins her drawings with the land. If you look at her work, there are moments of figure-ground reversal where the land is clearly the main subject and the humans are a supporting cast. (This is a radical shift from the pattern of seeing nature as scenery, resource or narrative backdrop.) I see you as both breaking with the traditions of anthropocentric storytelling. I have thought about how hard this is ever since I read Amitav Ghosh’s clarion call for new modes of storytelling in The Great Derangement. Ghosh essentially asks: If we are stuck within hierarchical systems and colonial ways of seeing the world, how can we build the ground for visualizing a world that doesn’t replicate the same patterns and problems? Is this something you think about? In your own experience, do you find that drawing allows you to consider different possibilities for (ecological) storytelling, thinking, sensing, believing, acting?

That’s quite a question! I’ll need to spend a lot of time thinking about it. What I can say is that I’ve never approached writing and illustration with much of a plan or theory, even though I enjoy thinking about all of these issues you mention. I totally agree with Ghosh, that there are narratives and structures we inherit – infused into visual and written language itself – which saddle us with as much inertia as movement, as much drag on the imagination as lift. I’m always thinking about everything I do as a problem of representation, and aware of the ways in which it is hamstrung, even more so in the world of commercial publishing, where truly original or radical narratives aren’t likely to go down so well. So yes, I suppose it’s something I do think about a lot already. I imagine there are ways we can at least use the language and systems we inherit to question, to subvert, and we can use conventional narrative structures to think about other possible narratives. I think all cultures do this incrementally, by degrees. You don’t need to break boundaries in order to change things.

A lot of my early work possibly does something like this, although not very consciously, and partly due to the fact I was fairly new to picture books, in a country without a very long or defined picture book tradition. The Rabbits, The Red Tree and The Lost Thing are three books that use an accessible picture book structure to question the way in which picture books are read, how the narratives can break down, have unexpected endings, and connect to different audiences. And also, getting back to your question, how the background landscape can carry as much (if not more) weight as the characters. I also enjoy playing with discontinuity and people and places with no identity, also with silence – narrators with no voice, as in The Red Tree – and lack of contextual explanation, such as the never-mentioned, terribly oppressive environment of The Lost Thing. My wordless novel The Arrival obviously takes that a step further, removing written narrative altogether, and offering no background context, with central characters typically diminished by strange landscapes.

But yes, it’s not something I strive to do, the books just seem to turn out that way, starting from far more conventional drafts. They evolve as I try to make them feel true to real experience, rather than storybook experience. When it comes to fantasy, that most primal experience of fiction is probably dreams. Even though I rarely recall my dreams, or able to give much clear meaning to them, there is something about their structure and pattern that I trust as an authentic, pretty unviersal form of storytelling. I feel confident about my writing and drawing when it starts feeling like a dream, the way familiar emotions are heightened and invested into unfamiliar landscapes, the way architecture shifts weirdly but acceptably. I often wonder if dreams are the origin of all fiction, given they show all of us to be such remarkable writers and illustrators, albeit wild and crazy ones, and only when asleep. I think they offer some useful means of bypassing cultural conventions and other learning, of coming up with original ways of seeing the world. When painting, drawing or writing is going particularly well, I always feel it’s a bit like wakeful dreaming. I’m just there to listen and transcribe, and try not to censor or edit too much in any first draft.

KM: Reflecting back on your own work, from The Lost Thing (2000) onward, do you feel your relationship to the surreal and fantastical has changed at all, particularly as the world becomes even more surreal? I mean we have yet to see giant, gape-mouthed fish floating above city streets (as one does in your book The Red Tree), but we have seen a lot of weird stuff in recent years!

I suppose the strangeness of the real world that I read about in the news every day only confirms my suspicions! There is the world we build in our minds, and then there is the real world, some objective reality out there that’s constantly tossing curve balls. I probably had the first inkling of this through science more than art, particularly learning the very convoluted history of science, and the ways in which people have misunderstood the natural world, and have been so resistant to obvious evidence, whether it be the existence of oxygen, the radical notion that the earth may not be the centre of the universe, or that humans may not be the centre of all biological creation. If my own work has changed at all over the years, I think it may be that fantasy and realism are less separated as categories, both in my mind and on the page. That is, I understand reality as semi-fictional, and vice versa, fiction constructs reality.

My book Tales from the Inner City for instance is painted in a much more naturalistic way, with realistic animals that are not especially anthropomorphic, they don’t speak or do very human things. They are ‘real’ creatures, existing as a troubling counterpoint to some misguided human activity or pretension. But even then, as a writer and artist I was struck by the realisation of how estranged I am as a human from the rest of nature, from other animals, and how I could do little more than create fiction or fantasy. I would be at the easel spending months meticulously painting deer, tigers, owls, and realising that each stroke was a struggle to connect to a being with which I had no direct first-hand experience, but rather knew through TV, film, photos, books, and captured zoo animals in artificial enclosures. And here I was making further representations, several times removed from reality, perpetuating that process. Is it right or wrong?

Well, I’ve come to realise that this it’s probably neither. That all of our ideas and impressions, our memories and projections, are separated from reality one way or another. I often enjoy explaining to my nine-year-old daughter that colours don’t really exist, that red and green, in fact all light, is something reconstructed in your brain from colourless wavelengths… which I’m not sure she enjoys hearing about so much as I enjoy dad-splaining! Although I can see she is finding these concepts fascinating. And that’s the thing, there is wonder in that distance, that discrepancy of perception and reality, in both believing and not believing your eyes at the same time. It’s quite exciting and empowering, the notion that everything is weird, that things are not ‘just so’, that nothing is obvious or normal.

Politically, I think that’s often a big problem we have, in dealing with contemporary troubles and divided opinions, especially for adults. I think we all make the mistake of thinking we know how things work, how things will play out, that this tiny sliver of experience we call life means we know enough to say certain things are ‘just so’. Reality is always going to be as much as you can imagine is, and then a whole lot more that you can’t.

KM: I was taught from an early age that familiarization is the grounds for intimacy and love. A refrain among many environmental writers is that we must become less estranged from and more familiar with our multispecies kin. Yet when I met you in Melbourne a few years ago, you completely upended my thinking by suggesting that familiarization is a questionable ethical objective, not to mention a wonky basis for connection. You said that the longer you draw something the more unfamiliar it becomes and that’s actually a good thing! Through close attention you let go of presumptuous intimacy and replace it with uncertain intimacy. What I took away is that intimacy means not assimilating the stranger into our worlds. It means allowing something to become more strange and mysterious, the more it is attended to and “known.” Does this sound about right? Do you think a recognition of the strangeness of the nonhuman world might heal our broken relationship with the environment?

That’s interesting hear that I up-ended your thinking! I hope for the best, I mean, possibly I’m wrong about that approach to nature. But at the very least it’s worth thinking about. We may have been talking about birds, and in particular, my pet parrot Diego, which has been flapping through our various homes for the past 22 years. I think our relationship with pets may offer a key insight here. Diego entered my life as a very unfamiliar being, my wife being the parrot-person, having once rescued and raised a cockatoo. I was at first intrigued by how reptilian this little yellow sun conure was up close, so clearly descended from a dinosaur, and commensurately strange and erratic in behaviour.

Over time I came to understand that behaviour, although I’d use the term ‘understand’ very liberally here. Certainly, we had theories about what Diego was thinking or feeling, knowing that if one thing happens, another thing is likely to follow – a cuddle, a bite, a certain sound, advance or retreat. But these were largely human presumptions, such as calling something a ‘dance’ or ‘aggression’ or ‘looking sad’. You could call this a kind of familiarity or knowing, although in a very narrow range. Over time, we came to realise our theories were probably wrong, that Diego is rarely feeling what we think he is feeling. For example, a ‘dance’ might actually be a sign of territorial anxiety, and a nasty sounding beak-grinding an expression of comfort. I feel that these counter-intuitive ‘meanings’ have deepened our perception of what an emotional connection might be, what intimacy might be. That it’s less about empathy with an animal, and more about enjoying and respecting the differences of our separate natures, of witnessing a larger spectrum. You don’t need to understand a thing to love it. In fact, that can make things incredibly limiting, especially when dealing with the non-human world.

I’m a little bothered, for instance, when I see nature documentaries that use music, narrative and selective framing to conjure human emotions in the world of non-human animals, to elicit our sympathy. Rather than expanding our understanding of the natural world, I think these techniques, perfectly well-meaning as they are, can actually entrench our sense of anthropocentric loneliness and prejudice.

When you speak to people who deal compassionately with certain animals on a regular basis, whether it be dogs or crocodiles, you’ll notice a more expansive respect, a serious appreciation of the gaps between species understanding, of enjoying deep mystery. That it’s important to appreciate these gaps and mysteries as positive things, not something to be solved, fully fenced or ‘owned’ by our human minds. This seems to be the key to having a functional relationship to the natural world, while still seeking knowledge, still trying to understand and love in our own way, which I think is what ancient, sustainable cultures have been doing. By recognising that humans are not the centre of things, not the only arbiter of meaning, not the only brains in the landscape.

As in matters of human society, of race, politics, gender and so on, perhaps we need to respect differences in the natural world without having to fully humanise them first. That can be a hard thing to do, but I think art and literature train us very well for such tasks. Fictional stories in particular are all about exploring and enjoying otherness, seeing how far our hearts and minds can stretch.

KM: You said recently, “Our relationship with nature is completely dysfunctional,” and that the best description you could give was that it is “spiritually wrong.” I was taken by the word “spiritual” and wondered if you could elaborate. I know you’re not planting political flags but I wonder if there is a flag that might campaign for a different, less wrong relationship? And: what is the role of art in all of this, particularly for those of us who can’t stomach hopelessness as a political position? It’s clear that facts and logic alone are insufficient levers in shifting the collective mindset.

Well, I feel a bit careless in making such grand statements. In truth, I don’t think our relationship with nature is completely dysfunctional, just mostly dysfunctional. My own included, so I’m in a poor position to preach solutions, and don’t have any clear flags. If anything, I’m drawn to art and literature to try and figure out my own position and beliefs.

I get the sense that the core problem has to do with emotional attachment and detachment, and perhaps this is a better expression to use than ‘spiritual’. Our ideas of division and separation seem to be all quite wrong. Even when we talk about preserving wilderness areas or ‘pristine’ environments, there’s something that seems a bit off about it, a bit disconnecting. Not only because no such things really exist, given our massive influence on climate for instance, but it sets up a mindset of nature as separate from human culture, that we are best kept divided. As if we can continue compromising one huge section of the earth so long as we leave another smaller one alone. Which of course never works long term because everything is connected.

Nature and culture are not separate categories of existence. I think post-industrial society has ridden on the back of that delusion for too long, and I’m drawn to any activity where the nature and culture are combined, even at the smallest scale like making a backyard garden. In such instances, a natural human passion for reuniting nature and culture is always forthcoming, it’s what we all seem to want desperately.

Art and literature obviously do the same. It sounds like a bit of a mantra, but one that never loses its truth: the key is imagination. Being able to exercise your mind to imagine other ways of existing, and being able to get excited about that, to pre-visualise, to feel in advance something hopeful. As you say facts and logic don’t seem to cut it with humanity. Even fear and crisis don’t afford the proportional response – in the face of slow death we drag our heels and turn inward, we elect false leaders, we make excuses. The real motivation for change has to be positive feeling, being able to imagine things already getting better. Stories have a huge role to play here, given that everything significant change that’s ever happened in human society has begun with someone telling a story, for better or worse. As artists and writers we have a natural bias towards truth and honesty, so our stories can be strong and enduring. Not necessarily right or wrong, but able to advance the imagination towards positive, motivating feelings, to have conceptual enthusiasm, beyond the terror of facts and seemingly insurmountable problems.

KM: I thought of you with the recent passing of English author-illustrator Raymond Briggs (in August 2022) because elements of his work—the wordless narrative moments, the approachable nonhumans, the flouting of ideas of “child-appropriateness”—feel kin to your own. Was he an influence? And are there other artists whose approach to words and pictures continue to inform your work and open up the possibilities of visual storytelling?

Yes, Briggs was a big influence for me at the beginning of my illustration journey. I’m very sad about his passing, and also that I’ll never have the chance to meet him and express appreciation in person. A good reminder to write to any living person whose work has been inspiring, and let them know. I came across When The Wind Blows around the time I was tasked with illustrating John Marsden’s apocalyptic text The Rabbits, and it really gave me confidence to push my vision into more adult territory, to not feel constrained by picture book conventions or the umbrella of ‘children’s literature’. Briggs’ story was, and is, a genuinely shocking book: seeing these cute, porcelain-coloured pensioners, characters that might have migrated from some cheerful comic strip, gradually dying in their home from radiation sickness, all the while trying to reconcile their trust in government leaflets and the idea of a benevolent world. I understand it may be the only picture book discussed in British Parliament, and helped galvanise the nuclear disarmament movement. I find that remarkable, the power of a fictional narrative drawn by one person in a small room to shift societal attitudes, simply by saying ‘this is what such a thing might look and feel like, let’s just think about it.’ Briggs had a wonderful way of taking big ideas and scaling them down to the size of a teacup on a kitchen table. His modest portrait of working class parents, Ethel & Ernest, channels a swathe of twentieth century social change through small and unassuming domestic spaces, more memorably than any number of historical textbooks.

I’m routinely learning from other artists, writers and film-makers all the time, too many to mention. The area of comics and graphic novels is especially diverse and complex these days, much more so than when I started out in the mid-90s. I was never much of a comics reader, and only came to graphic novels really when I noticed I was starting to make them, that is, having smaller and smaller panels in my picture books. I came to be very intrigued by the work of Chris Ware, taking visual narrative to a whole other level, and Daniel Clowes, whose character studies are wonderful and disturbingly accurate. In the world of picture book illustration, I always enjoy studying the work of Isabelle Arsenault, Kitty Crowther and Sydney Smith, all of whom have a wonderfully lyrical way with pencils and paint, an apparent spontaneity and lightness of touch that I always aspire to achieve with my own painting and drawing.

KM: What have you been reading? What books, films, shows, or graphic novels have you recently appreciated, or always loved?  What do you read, for inspiration, for fun, to alleviate climate anxiety? (Feel free to answer any or all or none of these questions.)

When you ask about alleviating climate anxiety, my immediate thought is, perversely, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’m not sure it’s my favourite book of recent years, but it’s the one I’ve read several times. Of course, it’s incredibly depressing and horrifying, but I think this results in a positive recoil, a reverse inspiration. I’ve probably never appreciated the existence of nature, of sunlight and growth, as much as I have since reading this harrowing vision of its near total obliteration. McCarthy paints such a disturbingly realistic alternate present, it really makes you want to hold fast to this one. That’s an interesting way in which ‘depressing’ art and literature can inspire you in an unexpected way. I often try to explain this when asked about dark themes in my work, that you need to have that kind of deep shadow before you can cast light upon it. In a similar way, I typically paint on a canvas primed in dark grey, and work from dark, dull colours to bright ones. It’s always something of a relief to be painting those highlights over all other muddy wrangling.

Lately I’ve been enjoying the work of Swedish author and painter Simon Stålenhag, who often portrays an alternate technological landscapes, not so much the future as the recent past, ominous electronic towers over 80’s suburbia, robots wandering the fringes like obsolete junk. I recently had the good fortune to illustrate some stories by Kelly Link, a magic realist writer (for want of a better term) and always enjoy reading her short stories. This collection White Cat, Black Dog is loosely based on familiar fairytales, tuned to a contemporary sensibility, with mobile phones, air travel, internet and so on. I enjoyed reading some Italo Calvino stories again recently, ‘The Distance of the Moon’ is one of my all time favourites. I was unexpectedly moved by the excellent ‘A Primate’s Memoir’ by Robert Sapolsky, about his life as a primatologist in Africa studying a tribe of baboons, which offers so much to think about on the subject of our relationship with other animals. I’m quite fortunate too that friends and colleagues often send me things to read, including their own work, as I’m not very good at finding new things myself. That’s one good thing about being a writer and illustrator, others get a good idea of what you like, your weird interests, and make great recommendations accordingly.

KM: I think many of us felt something like relief-worry-awe as we witnessed wildlife roaming through cities during the pandemic. My partner saw a coyote mosey down our busy Toronto street. A family of foxes reclaimed a nearby pedestrian path. I thought of your work, and particularly Tales from an Inner City, as I heard of other uncommon creaturely sightings around the world. Did you have any unique encounters during the so-called “anthropause”? And given the way life has uncannily imitated your art—do you have any predictions for the future, specifically as it relates to our interactions with the creaturely world?

Yes, it was very interesting that following the publication of Tales from The Inner City in 2018, the book gathered a stronger readership when the pandemic hit, as the images of wild animals roaming quite city streets became something of a reality (over here I saw owls sitting on powerlines for the first time, undisturbed by traffic). I actually think that might be one reason it was selected for the Kate Greenaway Medal in the UK, as the judges commented on the number of wild animals infiltrating British suburbs, and called the book ‘prophetic’, although I have to say it really isn’t, at least not quite yet! Things like a story about people refusing to wear face masks, even when they know that it might leave them open to lethal tiger attack, are pure coincidence. But I think the general feeling of some impending collapse, of a great dread creeping upon us, of looking to nature for signs and warnings, of being stuck in some kind of anthropocentric inertia, these are things we can all relate to. I don’t think covid-19 was a huge surprise to anyone. No more than seasonal raging fires and massive floods here in Australia.

 I’m hardly an expert on the state of the world, and not adept at making any predictions beyond the obvious, which we all know: that human society on this planet is accelerating towards dramatic change. It’s either going to be restorative or catastrophic, and history tells us – and I think literature also tells us – it will be a troubling mix of both. I dread news that polar bears are extinct in the wild, that major cities are deemed unliveable, that certain countries permanently give up on sustainable targets due to political unrest, that climate refugees are imprisoned in offshore detention centres.

I also look forward to news of fusion reactors, microbes that digest ocean plastic, and the millions of small actions by intelligent and caring people that stem the tides of global crisis every day. I look forward to as yet unimagined ways of connecting with the natural world, of thinking and feeling. There’s always that hope in non-existent things, which might exist. I’m always heartened by positive historical examples, such as the change in public attitude towards deforestation, industrial farming, fossil fuels or whaling. If you’d told people a hundred years ago that commercial whaling would be banned throughout much of the world, they would have thought you were nuts. That said, we see that such things remain an ongoing battle, even when public opinion shifts towards ethical living and sustainability. It’s not just about changing attitudes, it’s about constant vigilance and defence, understanding well the opposition to sustainability, as well as continuously trying to figure out what’s right, to question ourselves. And just trying to keep up.

Artificial intelligence will no doubt figure prominently in the future, and artists like us might be competing with more than a stock photo library! More interestingly, or concerning, is the likelihood that our very definition of what constitutes a human will change, as technology continues its march into the organic world. Right now, it’s fair to say that every person on earth was born to a human mother, and follows a common, ancient genetic line. I do wonder if things will not be so simple in the future, when we might look back on such ‘simple’ times as these with nostalgia. Or perhaps as the dark ages. Future humans may wonder, what on earth were they thinking? Thank goodness I’m not related.

KM: Finally, do you have a favorite creature?

Aside from my immediate family you mean? They are of course my favourite strange creatures! Of those created on paper, I like them all in different ways, but if pressed I’d have to admit a soft spot for the Lost Thing, that huge, rusty, crablike, pot-belly-stove-like mutant washed up on a beach. Actually, it’s the creature I least enjoy drawing, it’s far too complicated and hard to render in perspective, to draw with emotion, movement and even physical orientation, but I guess that’s part of the point. It’s challenging to look at. I first doodled it in my mid-twenties, struggling to carve out my identity, as many of us are around that time, and this creature seems to be a condensation of all kinds of youthful anxiety, as well as some concern about a nature-culture crossroads, and some political angst too. It’s a perfect creature in that way, it so represents how I felt at that time, even without me realising it. It has some mysterious creative power but no idea how to access it, no means of communication, and appears to have no recognizable place in a real-world economy. Sound familiar to any would-be artists out there?

 I’ve come to understand that this is the real function and value of imaginary creatures in painting, film and literature, they are possibly a crystallisation of anxieties and aspirations, presented in an entertaining way. They are a wonderful way of describing life indirectly, without particular place, language or culture, and touching on the fundamental enigma of existence. That we are always ‘lost things’ to some extent. I also frequently return to those three dinosaurs I drew as a small, preliterate child, especially that tiny reptilian foetus. Whether I knew it or not, I was basically drawing myself. It’s difficult not to. No matter how outlandish a creature is, it always ends up being a kind of self-portrait, but one that any other person might identify with, weird beings that we all are.