Jamie Bastoli

I am always looking to rework materials to make something less stable, more experiential, and slightly unhinged. I often use street trash, waste building materials, text, sound recordings, plaster, drawing, prints, some things real – others fabricated.

The content is manipulated from a process that involves observing mundane situations, exploring, deep conversations, music, writing bad poems, freak occurrences, conspiracies, unpicking the seams of my traumas, collages, merging things into digital places and back out again, and collecting materials that sort of just fall into the path of daily life. It is important for me to scavenge both materials and experiences – in the way that everything can be both free and used, a moment of meaning gained and given - much like the life we are sold in pursuit of fantasy or ideology of ourselves.

In the studio a process of assemblage starts and almost never ends in multiple ways, and so ideas lend themselves to different options, using architecture as an armature. Sometimes the works need to happen in a streetscape or landscape, just from the nature of the mass-produced materials and the environment. At times collaboration with others or the visitor is key as I am most curious about periphery senses, the way information translates, building paths for thoughts and illusions, and the unseen life in spirituality.

Jamie completed a BFA Honours at the National Art School in 2016 and BIA Architecture at UNSW in 2012.