The Illustrated Companion to Tasmanian Fishpoems (You Can’t Take The Piss All The Time)
Bobby K
November 2023–November 2024
Courtyard Commission
Contemporary Art Tasmania
“The Illustrated Companion to Tasmanian Fishpoems is a text-based painting through which I discuss fish, and how to catch them when they aren’t there. Three texts are braided tentatively together to create a space of energetic visual noise where the viewer can go to feel small and nervous and eat a bubble-o-bill. The texts employ elements of automatic writing, satire, intuitive symbolism and ripping off the classics, aiming to mystify the viewer into accepting a complex relationship between symbolic satanism, the decline of Flathead fishing, and the excellent cooking of Linh-Chi Nguyen. The point is: hope that glints like a kitchen knife at a riot.
Let it flow up your waterspout.”
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Bobby K is a Tasmanian-based drummer in the black metal band SLIMER. He is also a former ruckman for the Swansea football club and a founding member of The People’s Wine Cooperative, a worker cooperative that makes wine available to the public at cost price. Bobby K has no primary creative medium and no formal education in visual arts or writing, adopting instead a scattergun approach to hunting the art-duck. He covets the duck and wants to kill it and eat it but usually just self-publishes zines instead. His writing is influenced by an interest in hybrid mythologies and future religions, Australian rules football, ecologies of thought, and the digestible parts of Marxist theory. His painting is influenced by not knowing anything about painting.