DIOKNO Pasilan is what The Rat Art Group calls their \u201cpivotal person.\u201d<\/p>\n
About seven years ago, his primary aim as a multimedia artist was to discover who else was making art in his area, build connections with them and collaborate.<\/p>\n
Building a loose collective, this became The Rat Art Group, including his neighbour Scott Fredericks, old friends Pippa Tandy and David Bromfield, and PJ Gregg, who laughs about the first time he crossed paths with Pasilan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I met Diokno, he was sitting forlorn in the pub,\u201d he said. \u201cI was the finder of him. That was it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Together, the five creatives are putting on multimedia exhibition, Locus<\/em> at Backspace Gallery, exploring memory, village life of the Philippines, travel, the repurposing of scrap and found materials, Ballarat\u2019s car fires, consumerism and dystopian futures.<\/p>\n But one work by Bromfield, Postcards from Dad<\/em>, doesn\u2019t as much look at the wastefulness of now or the potential state of the future, it touches more on what could have been.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about postcards that my father didn\u2019t send me in the war,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve tried to create postcards that look like things that he said to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Relationships are a big part of the exhibition for Bromfield, not just looking at the art he\u2019s produced, but at the people he\u2019s collaborating with in The Rat Art Group.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody here is connected to art. The reason I\u2019m here is because I\u2019ve known Diokno,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re remarkable people, and they\u2019re probably the most interesting artists in Ballarat because they\u2019re dedicated, they do lots of other work than this… They run public art shows and a caf\u00e9 called Ballarista…\u201d<\/p>\n The act of creating, and its thought processes, are hugely important to surviving this life for Bromfield.<\/p>\n \u201cIf people aren\u2019t creative, they\u2019re doomed. It\u2019s the only thing we\u2019ve got to keep us alive and if you\u2019re not creative and you have no resource, you cannot resist what\u2019s coming,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n