Dreaming of hornbill birds and clouded leopards

Woodcut by Omar bin Musa

Omar bin Musa is an author, poet, rapper, and artist from Australia. His debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, published in 2014, was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the People’s Choice Award at the ACT Book of the Year Awards. In 2015, he was named a Young Novelist of the Year by The Sydney Morning Herald. In 2017, he released “Since Ali Died,” a full length hip-hop album, which became a one-man play that premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney, Australia.

I first had the pleasure of making Omar’s acquaintance back in the spring of 2016. He was in Toronto to help headline the Spur Festival, a literary festival I helped produce. I was a fan of his writing prior to meeting him, and moved to chills by his spoken word performance at the festival, so I was excited to get to know him better during his weekend in the city. We got better acquainted over late-night poutine, drinks in Kensington market, and, if memory serves, some embarrassing karaoke. I had a blast. He was undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable speakers I’ve hosted in my (former) event career.

Though I’ve only had the opportunity to meet Omar in person once, I’ve been following him on Instagram since. I noticed his work started to take on a different direction. Omar began to create works of art out of woodcuts. We spoke in December, 2020, about his foray into woodcutting, how he’s been holding up since COVID-19, and how the medium has allowed to tap into his sense of humour.

How are you doing? How’s COVID-19 been for you?

Everything is pretty open. I live in Queanbeyan, which is a small town in New South Wales outside of Canberra, the capital of Australia. We’ve been really lucky here, unlike somewhere like Melbourne, which has been in lockdown on and off for months. I live in the countryside so, even when we were in lockdown, I was able to go on some nice socially-distanced walks along the Queanbeyan River, which is beautiful and where I grew up. I took in a lot of nature, took the opportunity to start reading a lot again, and took things at a slower pace.

I’ve had conflicting feelings because I haven’t been able to travel as much as I want to. I did want to move back to Borneo this year and live there this year for six-to-eight months (or maybe even a year). Borneo is where my family’s from and my ancestors are from. I’ve been spending a lot of time there over the last five years and that’s actually where I picked up woodcutting.

You’re a multi-talented fellow—you’ve done music, books, plays, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of stuff—so I wasn’t really surprised to find you experimenting with different medium, but I’d be really interested in learning what drew you to woodcutting and how that particular medium came into your life.

I’ve always loved visual art. Even before I got into poetry, I was more into drawing and painting because my grandmother was a cane painter and I come from an artistic family. My Mom’s an arts journalist, so I was always going to exhibitions and I think I was drawn to the visual even before I was drawn to words. When I write, I conceive of my poems and fiction in a really visual way—as if I’m trying to describe in words vignettes from a movie or frames of an old photograph.

About two years ago, I went on a really life-changing journey up-river in Borneo, from the East Coast right into the heart of the jungle. It felt like an existential journey as much as a literal one. I was at a point in my life where my mental health was pretty bad and I’d become pretty disillusioned with writing and my place in the writing world. I felt like the thing I had once loved and was passionate about, I now hated—instead of nurturing me it was slowly destroying me (or maybe not so slowly). With all that in mind, I went on this river journey to the heart of my homeland and I felt this weight lift off my shoulders. I felt a freedom I hadn’t known before when I got there.

I knew something significant was going to happen, but I didn’t know what it was. I knew I was looking for a new creative outlet that wasn’t writing and I didn’t know what that was going to be. I didn’t even think of anything visual.

I happened to be in a place called Tamparuli, which is outside of Kota Kinabalu in the East coast state of Sabah, which is quite near where my Dad was born. They’ve got a place called the Tamparuli Living Arts Centre, which, as far as I know, is one of the few arts residences in Borneo. They had asked me there to do a performance. I was just rapping and doing some poetry but I could see that they had a woodcut workshop.

Everyone was sitting on the ground and there was this crazy punk rocker called Aerick LostControl—I don’t think that’s his government name. He’s covered in tattoos and scars and has a huge bright smile and he was teaching these people how to do woodcuts. He was a member of a famous woodcut collective called Pangrok Sulap. Pangrok Sulap was this collective of guys from up in the mountains—a place called Ranau. “Pangrok,” is the Malayanisation of punk rock and “sulap” is a farmer’s hut—a resting hut in the fields where a farmer would go. So it’s like punk rock from the hut. These guys would make these beautiful woodcuts using cheap brown MDF (medium-density fiberboard) often with themes relating to environmental destruction in Borneo, corruption in Malaysia—quite political things—but also themes that were just longing for a return to a more simple way of life like looking after nature. For years and years, I think we had heard about each other from afar but I never got the chance to meet them. So, when Aerick was doing the workshop I came over after I was done performing and they were already halfway through. I said, “Look man, I know you’ve already started and I’ll probably be really shit at this but can I give it a go?”

He said, “Of course. Just draw something. All you need to know is the v-shaped woodcut tool makes a deeper, thinner groove and the u-shaped one makes a shallow wider one. You can make different effects like this—” and he showed me some grass and clouds. Then he goes, “Just draw something and then carve it. See how you go.”

I hadn’t drawn anything in years and I just sat down and thought, I’m going to draw the most beautiful thing I know. The most beautiful thing that I knew was the Bornean clouded leopard, a beautiful big cat (well, a smallish big cat, really) that cruises around in the jungle and near rivers. I’ve never seen one in person but I’ve dreamt of them. So I drew this little cheeky clouded leopard with its tongue poking out and a few clouds around it. Then I wrote: “When the loggers are away the leopards will play.”

I was just so stoked when I saw it printed. I don’t know what he saw, but Aerick said, “Man, I think you’re going to be really good at this. I can tell that you’re going to get into this.” He gave me two woodcut tools: a u- and v-gouge and little piece of MDF and he said, “Go on. Go and practice. Go and work on it.”

I’ve been to the highlands. I was just sitting there and I started carving the patty fields and all the things that I saw. That was it. I was addicted after that. I became obsessed. Within a few months, I had my first exhibition in Sydney.

How does place or a sense of place influence your woodcuts and your work?

Places are also projections. They’re as much a product of our fantasies, and imaginations, and memories, and longings, as rocks and trees and water. A lot of my woodcuts have been made in Australia about Borneo and about my longings for the place. I find that it anchors me and it gives me an outlet for those dreams. It allows me to stay connected to my heartland, to my homeland.

I’ve done a recent woodcut and it’s about being in lockdown. There’s a poem that goes with a picture of a volcanic mountain that has plants all beneath it, and the ocean beyond, and a hornbill bird sitting in a tree. The poem says, “I missed the jungle so I propagated a memory and made one on my windowsill. Then I ate tom yum.” It’s about how here, in Queanbeyan, in COVID-19 times, you couldn’t really leave your house for a while so everyone got into gardening. I was propagating little succulents and putting them on my windowsill. I made a jungle on my windowsill that I could visit and dream of hornbill birds and clouded leopards while sitting in a suburban flat in wintry Queanbeyan with skeletal trees outside and frost on the ground. Windows become portals to different places and memories and our art does as well, obviously.

I keep it pretty simple. I see a lot of visual art out there is so postmodern and intellectual and I’m not a very smart person—

Oh, c’mon now.

But I do have a very big imagination. I just follow that. I made work that makes me feel good. Whereas, with my writing, I would make work that was about destroying myself. The process, maybe even the content, was so dark.

I’ve noticed, in your woodcuts, there’s a lot more humour. It’s just a little cheekier than some of your writing. Is that because the medium has allowed you to go to those cheeky places?

The humour—woodcuts was an amazing outlet for that. I was influenced a lot by a dear friend of mine who is a bit of a star of the contemporary art scene in Australia called Jason Phu, a Chinese-Vietnamese-Australian artist. He uses heaps of irreverent humour in his work. When I saw his work, and I was getting excited to make my own work, it was that amazing moment as a writer or an artist when you see something and you go, “Oh, I didn’t realize you could do that.”

That realization leads you to be able to try different things. I started putting silly jokes in my artwork, characters talking to each other, making fun of each other, making semi-nonsensical long titles. Being friends with Jason, that influenced me a lot. I liked his playfulness. Even if you’re talking about the darkest thing, being playful with the words or the visual construction is very important.

I don’t have a great grasp on the process of woodcutting. Can you talk a bit about the process?

I know some people that will play around with it on Photoshop or draw it beforehand. I draw directly onto the wood. I don’t do sketches. There’s a bit of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants element to it, which I like. Once you cut into the wood, it’s done. You have to keep going. You can’t really revise it. I mean, you can come up with clever ways of trying to hide it but I like that. You can’t beat yourself up too much about it.

I have a mate who is an artist who said, “Ah, man, you should do it on Photoshop first so you actually know what it’s going to end up looking like.” But that mystery of what it’s going to be excites me. You’re working with everything backwards. You honestly don’t know what it’s going to look like until everything is printed. So much work goes into it before the final revelation. I find that pretty exciting.

That sounds pretty exciting. Very different from writing.

It’s difficult too. It’s physical. I’m using my hands. Your knuckles get sore, your hands get calloused, your palm gets bruised so there’s an element of pain that goes into it and endurance in the lead-up to an exhibition, I’m finding. You see all the Pangrok Sulap guys and they’ve got huge calluses on their fingers where they hold the tools. I like that element.

For instance, with writing, I can’t listen to anything when I’m writing. If I do listen to something, it might be instrumental. With woodcuts, because it’s got that more practical hands-on element, I can put on a podcast and work for like eight hours straight. I really like that.

We’ve talked about how getting into woodcutting has been a bit of a journey as an artist for you. I have a feeling there are quite a few creatives out there right now who are struggling a bit. Do you have any advice for them?

Be playful. That’s one thing. At a certain point as artists, we start to take ourselves too seriously and think that the future of our world rests on every single serious letter that we pen or stroke that we make on a canvas. I think joy has to be there as well. I’m only saying this because I’ve written from a place of darkness for so long.

I’ve come to this realization that an element of risk is an essential part of art and art-making, and maybe even writing. I came up with my own definition when people ask for my definition of poetry. I said, “I’ve come to this point where I think it’s about finding the right word vessel for an intellectual or emotional risk.”

Funnily enough, I heard Mike Tyson talking about this the other day during this really cool interview at the New York Public Library with Paul Holdengräber. He was talking about how he won’t try anything unless there’s a risk of complete and utter humiliation. I’m not sure I’ll go that far, but I do sort of see what he’s saying. In risking being playful and trying stupid, silly, irreverent things you can make a bit of a fool out of yourself, but it’s also the only way you can have a real creative breakthrough.

Another piece of advice would be to just take a break sometimes. Try something completely different. Go out into the garden, take a quilt-making workshop, go work in a cafe, drive an Uber. Sometimes, when you’re banging your head against the wall and trying to be so singularly-focused it actually can be counterproductive. Knowing when to let your mind rest is good too. And not beating yourself up about it.

Thanks so much for taking the time today. Anything else you’d like to add before we say farewell?

To be making art from a place of joy again, it reminds me of why it was I got into this game in the first place, when I was a kid. I just loved it and it would unmoor mind for a few hours every day.

Where can people buy your woodcuts?

omarmusaqbn.bigcartel.com