Forthcoming Platform, ex. cat. (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2024).

In Brisbane’s artist-run initiative (ARI) community, Sarah Poulgrain is a humble dynamo who frequently collaborates with and enables fellow artists. In the past, their work has been less about producing things, more about learning and sharing skills—from welding to weaving, chair making to hat making—building community in the process. It goes against the grain. These days, commercial outsourcing, rather than doing it yourself, is a mark of professionalism for artists.

Poulgrain lives and works in a former bike-wrecker’s workshop in Woolloongabba, doubtless in violation of any number of council regulations. They moved there in 2017 with artist friends Anya Swan and Hailey Atkins. They fixed up the place, building walls and installing utilities, picking up skills along the way. It wasn’t easy. For ages, they managed without hot water. Poulgrain is the only one remaining of the original trio, having watched a string of flatmates come and go. The building is also home to the ARI Wreckers Artspace. It occupies a ground-floor shop space, but projects routinely expand to take in other parts of the building, as required. It enables young-and-restless artists at grassroots level. It prides itself on its flexibility, offering them an opportunity to experiment, and to show or not, as they wish. Even as an alternative, it’s alternative.

Poulgrain’s situation is precarious. After experiencing debilitating floods and perpetually faced with the prospect of losing their home to gentrification, Poulgrain had a brainwave: build an ark and escape onto the Brisbane River. Like their current space, it would be part residence, part exhibition space, but it would rise with the tides and they couldn’t ever be evicted by landlord or council—fingers crossed. In the beginning, Poulgrain dubbed it Dreamboat, but, now, as it becomes a reality, it’s simply Houseboat.

The project took a village. Marilena Hewitt drafted the plans. Atkins and Swan developed novel paper-pulp walls; Tyza Hart and Bree Meyers made bathroom tiles and Dan Kolencik the bathroom sink; Dana Lawrie helped with the leadlight canopy; Georgia Morgan fashioned fittings and hooks; permaculture specialists Alrey Batol and Swan developed blackwater and greywater systems; and Leen Rieth wove rugs and spun ropes. These collaborators helped in their own ways, adding their aesthetics and sensibilities into the mix. Charlie Hillhouse and Madeline Stack recorded the process on video.

With Houseboat nearing completion, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) invited Poulgrain to unveil it—or at least the ARI half—in its new emerging-Queensland-artists show Platform, before it hits the water. The boat was designed to pack down, so Poulgrain could easily assemble and disassemble it within the IMA. It looks like a rudimentary shed, with bare joinery, no insulation, clad and roofed with corrugated plastic—not unlike the corrugated-iron-clad Wreckers itself. Its big glass sliding door came from a demolition yard. Its charm is its no-nonsense practicality, its no-aesthetic aesthetic. I’m reminded of Noah’s Ark—or, rather, how we tend to picture it. It’s blocky, not pointy; less a vehicle to navigate the waterways, more a barge, with limited manoeuvrability, although Poulgrain does plan to attach a couple of outboard motors. 

In Platform, Poulgrain launched their ARI with its first show, comprising works already part of the project. There’s Alrey Batol’s novel cookers, Leen Rieth’s bespoke rug-cum-welcome-mat, and Charlie Hillhouse’s videos documenting the construction. (With those videos playing inside the boat, I’m reminded of Robert Morris’s self-referential Box with the Sound of Its Own Making from 1961.) Outside, a mud-horizon wall painting recalls the effect of those floods in Woolloongabba. A painting—of the leadlight structure Poulgrain created with Lawrie for the absent residence half—is one of eight documenting the key collaborations that made Houseboat possible.

I’m decades older than Poulgrain. As much as their project looks to the future, it takes me back to my New Zealand childhood—before deregulation, globalisation, and free trade—when we had limited access to goods and DIY skills were common. We grew our own food in our veggie patch. Mum sewed our clothes. Dad crafted our toys in his workshop. Our clothes and toys weren’t sophisticated; they were certainly more basic than one might buy in a store today.

For me, Poulgrain revives this bygone ethos, but with a twist. In my parents’ day, DIY was practical and cost effective, but, these days, it isn’t. Why go to the bother? Why waste all that precious time making things yourself—reinventing the wheel—when mass-produced things are so cheap to buy? Surely, only for the perverse pleasure of the impracticality. Which is why I wonder where Poulgrain really fits on the pragmatist–dreamer spectrum? Is practicality just a cover story for the dreamer?

Poulgrain’s project has many reference points. I think of Soviet productivism, The Whole Earth Catalogue, the DIY domes of Colorado’s Drop City, and designer artists such as Andrea Zittel and Superflex. But Poulgrain doesn’t need my art history. Their project grew out of their needs, not as a commentary on my art history (although it comments on art institutions). It is what it is.

It is political. The scenes around Wreckers and the IMA are close, somewhat aligned, somewhat antagonistic. We may envy the grassroots freedom, fun, and friendship of ARIs; they may envy our funding and visibility. When Poulgrain places their ARI within the IMA, it’s a clash. It’s pointedly a show within a show, a platform within a platform, an alternative within an alternative. Is Houseboat co-opted by the IMA’s logic, or vice versa?

Houseboat is not dogmatic. The project may echo those of survivalists—preparing for natural or social disasters, the end of the world as we know it; creating bunkers, stockpiling supplies, acquiring survival skills—but it has developed out of mundane immediate questions, not apocalyptic paranoia. And, unlike libertarian seasteaders—those right-wing pioneers who would found their own islands in the middle of nowhere to escape the jurisdiction of existing nation states—Poulgrain holds down a public-service job and happily accepts support from government arts agencies. Creative Australia and Arts Queensland have both invested in Houseboat.

Houseboat is measured. It tempers pessimism with hope. It will serve the artist as a private residence and their community as a gallery. In the face of climate crisis and gentrification, it asserts self-sufficiency and collectivism. It combines stock solutions from Bunnings with experimental ones (those paper-pulp walls). It’s a thing, a big thing, but also amorphous, a social experiment. It may be an escape pod for one, but it envisages a flotilla of like minds, fellow dreamers and refuseniks, escaping onto the River.

[IMAGE: Sarah Poulgrain Houseboat (Gallery Side) 2024, Platform, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2024.]