Meggs, Lister and Kid Zoom in a South London warehouse

Early summer 2011 had a strong Australian accent in London’s galleries. Within a few days of each other, three painters who had come up through the street scenes of Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth all had reasons to be in town, and the chance was too good to waste. The UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost found them a derelict warehouse in South London, handed over the walls and asked the film collective itdrewitself to record the session. The result, a short film titled MEGGSxLISTERxKID-ZOOM, went up on Vimeo in July and was picked up by Vandalog and other street-art blogs within days.

Who was in the room

Meggs is David Hooke, a founding member of the Everfresh crew, the Melbourne collective that has been painting together since 2004. He was in London for Inner Demons, his first solo exhibition in the UK, which opened at ZeroCool Gallery on 23 June. The show dealt with duality, pairing human faces with demon masks through painting, collage, print and installation, a theme he keeps returning to.

Anthony Lister, the best travelled of the three, grew up in Brisbane and has spent years moving between Australia, New York and Europe. He came to London from Berlin and had just put on a print show at Pictures on Walls on Commercial Street in the East End, built around a hundred hand-finished Fan Boy prints that sat somewhere between a screenprint and an original painting. He had also been putting up murals and stickers around the city in the weeks around it.

Kid Zoom is the name Ian Strange paints under. He started writing graffiti as a teenager in Perth, where pieces rarely lasted more than a few days, and that habit of photographing everything before it disappeared shaped how he thinks about his work: the documentation often reaches more people than the wall itself. He met the Everfresh painters online in the MySpace years, which is how a kid from the far west of the country ended up exhibiting alongside the Melbourne crowd.

The session

The idea was simple. Rather than meet at an opening, the three would paint together and talk about what they do while they worked. The warehouse gave them room and privacy, and the camera caught both the painting and the conversation. The styles are different enough to make the shared wall interesting: Meggs with his bold graphic forms and layered colour, Lister with his fast, expressive line, Kid Zoom with his tightly worked spray paint. Vandalog singled out Kid Zoom’s contribution as the strongest of the three.

itdrewitself had been working with Very Nearly Almost through the year, filming artists and events around London for short web pieces. This one was picked up more widely than most, because it caught three painters side by side at a busy moment, each with work on show in the city.

Australian painters were a steady presence on the London circuit that year, in galleries and on East End walls, and the film is a tidy record of that moment: three of them, from three different cities, sharing one wall in a building nobody else wanted.