Mic Porter, back in Melbourne

Anyone who has walked Melbourne’s laneways with an eye on the walls since the early 2000s has seen Mic Porter’s work, and in the city’s graffiti, urban and contemporary art circles his name comes up quickly. In 2017, after three years living in Auckland, he was back and working hard. He talked to the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost about the work from a newly rented workspace north of the city centre.

Painter, sculptor, collector

Porter calls himself a painter and sculptor who has dabbled in several other media. He is Melbourne-based but has travelled widely and taken in a lot of other cultures, most recently during his years in New Zealand.

He was reluctant to name a style, or even to agree he has one. He swings between loose, free line work and very tight drawing, and admits to being fussy either way. Most of his output is figurative painting and sculpture, but he has made a good deal of installation work too, including a recent residency at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery.

Much of his practice runs on other people’s discards. He picks up anything reusable: steel he can weld, plastic he can melt into new shapes, timber he can screw or nail together. His paint has traditionally been leftover tins rescued from hard rubbish collections, the tip or somebody’s shed. Part of that is environmental conviction. He has never liked buying materials from shops, he said, because what he needs is usually already out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

Lately, though, he had started spending on good oil paint, boards and canvas. The reason was an exhibition at Backwoods Gallery planned for later in 2017: he wanted to make work that would last, and felt he owed the work some thought about its future.

The faces

The large, grotesque faces that made his name on Melbourne walls are, he said, partly self-portraits. Each one expresses a feeling, though not always the obvious one; happiness might come out as a huge smile, and sadness as a wicked grin. He also treats them as practice. He enjoys anatomical drawing and is curious about how expression works, from the set of a face and the gesture of a body down to which colour belongs where. Each face is a step in that learning.

He approaches sculpture, street painting and studio painting with the same head and the same set of ideas. For the Yarra Sculpture Gallery residency he gathered material as he went, intensively; he would spot a heap of junk on the pavement that was perfect for something, and gradually several sculptures took shape in his mind while the pieces turned up. His wall paintings work the same way. He starts without a sketch, straight on the surface, and lets the shape of the wall decide the composition.

His favourite way to work is big, though opportunities have been scarce. Finding a site or a sponsor that will let him paint whatever he likes is hard, not least because his imagery can be surreal and openly erotic, with sexual anatomy worked into the features of a face. Clients tend to set conditions, and conditions do not suit him. He accepted, with some regret, that complete freedom is not how the world runs.

Melbourne against Auckland

The difference between the two cities, for a graffiti painter, comes down to cleaning. Auckland’s zero-tolerance approach means walls are buffed almost immediately, so there is no record of anyone’s progress: a tag from two years ago simply is not there to compare with today’s. Melbourne leaves more alone. Porter found a lot of new and exciting work on his return, and valued the way the city lets you trace another writer’s development through their hand style or murals over years.

A squat in the gallery

For Backwoods he was still brainstorming, but one idea was to build a small dwelling inside the gallery, modelled on the tiny shelters some homeless people make in Japan, cardboard boxes barely the size of a cubicle yet decorated with real care. He liked the idea of setting up a squat in the space and making the show there as a kind of residency, even if the result was mainly a display of his belongings: mattress, buckets, paint, spray cans, clothes. The aim was authenticity. He did not want to make everything in a studio and then just drop it off.

The paintings for that show would be oil on canvas, a deliberate step up. On a plinth in a white room, he pointed out, something painted on rubbish tends to look like rubbish.

He works mostly by instinct and is rarely satisfied, and a lot of what he makes is, by his own cheerful admission, ugly and unwanted. He likes that. The process demands that things get made, and he enjoys work that looks dirty and wrong. He does want viewers to be part of it, though, and tries to draw them in.

Company and a new child

Since coming home he had been painting a great deal with Bailer and joining large group productions. Working alone, he said, makes him narrow; other artists give him something to bounce off and a chance to learn from them, and any support is welcome.

He had also recently become a father. It had not changed his art much, he said, but it had given him a push to take the work seriously and plan ahead instead of hanging around rubbish bins, and it confirmed that art is what he should be pursuing.

Asked what he wanted to be known for, Porter said nothing at all. When someone tells him what his work is like, his instinct is to do the opposite. After a compliment on his loose but hard-edged line drawings he turned to pointillism, painting in dots, because it was the furthest thing from those brutal lines.

His next project, Discarded, was due on 1 June 2017: 480 drawings made on found objects.