Evi o. - Designer & Artist
Evi is a fascinating artist and designer. She runs Evi-O.Studio a design studio nestled within the industrial complex of Marrickville, Sydney where you’ll find a bustling commercial design studio upstairs and a colourful array of paint and canvases downstairs. We spoke with Evi at Semi Permanent Sydney.
HARRI: How would you describe your work?
EVI: I describe my work as human. My design work looks perfect, the grid is in perfect alignment because the computer does that. But then you will see my art. I try to attempt to create perfect lines. But in this perfection, seemingly, there are lots of imperfections, and I think that's what being human is about.
HARRI: Waiting On The World is all about helping creative’s carve out their careers. How has yours evolved over the years?
EVI: My upbringing wasn't that creative in that like I was, I wasn't exposed to many creative stuff. I grew up in the second biggest city in Indonesia. It was a business city, so there was a lot of hustle and bustles. But I've never been to an art gallery until I moved to Australia when I was 17. But I knew I was attracted to creativity as a child in that, you know, I remember times in the bedroom with my grandma playing with paper boats and coming up with stories. So storytelling was probably my first foray into creativity and then I moved to Australia to study design.
HARRI: So you’ve just finished studying, now what?
EVI: That was like 2008 or something. The choices were quite limited. There’s the obvious design agencies, but I wasn't quite attracted to it. I saw this little job ad looking for an illustration for a book and I'm like, okay, I guess I can illustrate. I've got a degree on it, right? Surely. And I applied, got in and my first job was actually drawing Dinkus’s, the little icons between two paragraphs as a freelancer. Then, they were looking for a designer. I applied and convinced the art director to give me a junior role. So that was my first foray into the publishing industry. I stayed in that job for eight and a half years. That was my one and only job, which is fairly bizarre for a person in our generation.
HARRI: So you’re free to spend your time as you please, now what?
EVI: Thanks to Instagram, the tool of the day. I put my work up there with no expectations. I didn't manifest anything because it was really just an outlet for my boredom. With my art, I thought I was getting good at expressing myself but it actually made me reflect back on what I've been, you know, what I've gone through, what I want to do. Because with painting or art practice, you spend a lot of time with yourself.
HARRI: Tell us about the difference between art and design. You hold both, one in each hand - how do they interplay?
EVI: When we talk about art and design, there are a few things to talk about here. But first let's talk about function and beauty. I mean, in our studio we create a lot of beauty and a lot of them are quite colourful and happy – But I guess beauty comes in different forms as well, right?
The function of art is ultimately self-expression. But it's a self-expression of the artist, right? That is messaging, people forget that's what we do in design – It's just not our own voice. It's all about activating our sensory response and making us feel something. And then hopefully we will engage with it and get the message. So art and design functions the same way that way.
HARRI: How have you used the commercial side of our work to carve out a career that can fund your art?
EVI: So my design studio has run for four or five years now, it was tough in the first like three and a half years. Running a design business is very different to what I think a lot of people think involved in that. Yes, doing good work is given. That's not even the challenge. The challenge is actually how do you create a safe workplace for people who want to work at your place? How do you make a healthy cash flow so you don't have to worry about paying your people endlessly? And how do you nurture good culture? How do you nurture talents? It's not about you and it's about other people. It's interesting to see when your clients believe in your work, you see that it's kind of like a healthy cycle of someone believing in you, then you give it back to your client and your team. It's not as glamorous as people think, but it's rewarding.
HARRI: Creatives often struggle with the business side. What’s it like being creative and running a business?
EVI: It's funny being creative. We have this tendency to hate business sometimes. But why is business bad? I actually don't understand. Why is money bad? Who set up these ideas? I feel like it's kind of like that you have to drink two liters of water every day. To be honest, I grew up in Indonesia, the social classes are very apparent. Doing business was kind of a way to to win over the system if you really wanted to, because with the minimum wage it’s just impossible. It's still the same now, to enter this beautiful journey called running of business can be very liberating in that you do get to create your own world and your own way of living in this world. And I don't know why it's got such a bad name and like it's almost like we did with all this idea of a starving artist and it's just like, No, I don't want to be a starving artist.
