Q. One of the first things that interested me in your practice was the incredibly diverse art and life histories that you describe, in conversation as well as in the work itself (you were an architect for many years; you are interested in Japan; you also talk about growing up in the grounds of a mental hospital). How conscious is your use of elements from this varied experience and professional knowledge?

A. Very loose and unconscious, but that itself is conscious because it's a question of deliberately using one's unconscious abilities. I'm certainly working from a pool of memories and associations which produce my images.

Q. I understand that you finished your MA in 1994 after a 'late' start at art school as a painter.

A. I would say I've been involved in painting since I was five; it's why I did architecture. As students we had to submit 30 'freehands' (painting, anything). Lloyd Rees was a teacher, and the plein-air tradition was still on the go-watercolours and so on. Some abstraction. One of us even did a lot of action paintings. He knew about Pollock-which was more than I did. Later I was always involved in some sort of misguided art or craft activity after work, and in my architectural work I was often involved in art areas, but there was no space to focus on painting. I also had a shop with some friends, plastic lights and furniture; I could draw 12 terrace house cards an hour! I used coloured textas. I started off again at art school because I needed to find a position in the context of art.

Q. Your current work is still not such a big jump from the past, for instance, your time as an architect. You're familiar with negotiating new structures as they develop in our culture, with taking on new methodologies and constructions to suit yourself. It's not such a big step to adopt a different life mode/work mode. It seems to me that it's just a progression, and your use of new computer technologies is part of that.

A. I'm used to the idea of using a lot of different modes to do what I want, and using computers is just another. I think I collect ways of doing things hoping that the next one will really be it, which can be a bit of a waste of time-but sometimes it can really fuel things.

Q. So you're not just another star struck tech-head. Do you think this makes the work you produce less glossed with the 'software-given type look'? You're not doing 3D rendering for the sake of it

A. Yes and no, because I get very hooked into the computer process and its illusory depth: there's a lot about desire in that little screen, and I get really addicted to very stupid gamesbut in relation to work, I think a lot of computer work is really back to the 1950s in look, and that's not interesting in itself. Like 'now' is usually a new version of yesterday but this time it really looks like it; but we forget how all this stuff is really still crawling.

Q. The use of narrative is another very consistent tool in your work. What is it about narrative that holds you? Are you still making sense of things?

A: In terms of making an overall sense I think I'm more interested in this since being at art school; beforehand I wouldn't have felt the need. Narrative is incidental to that aspect, but I think I read so much as a child [that] my mind-set is irretrievably cast in that mould.

Q. On one hand your work doesn't go anywhere. There's no point in trying to get to 'the end', but there is this strong feeling of structure. The road movie 1: prodigal isn't suggesting a closure, or begging an end. Your characters aren't going anywhere particular, they're just exploring.

A. Well, they'll get to an end sooner or later. Certainly the stories have a beginning like we all do, but the characters go along in an innocent way, 'just looking'. There's a random way in which the stories evolve, because image and text rebound off each other, throwing up suggestions-'it seemed like a good idea at the time'-but, oddly, that produces structures. There is a grammatology maybe. I really like the associative power of words for bringing up things [one] hadn't realised were there, or introducing a new topic. I'm interested in relationships between languages, like, say, the way the word cha moves through Eastern languages as a word for 'tea'.

Q. Is there an autobiographical element in all this?

A. Yes, well, there's a huge use of childhood resources and a lot of references to the adult state of play. It is a blatant use of autobiographical stuff, not so much in road movie 1: prodigal but lots of personal stuff. That embarrasses me so I disguise it; I make comics out of family photographs-stuff usedwhich would be boring for others so I transform it but so that it still satisfies my own needs. I hope there is an invisible resonance for others when they read their own stuff into it. And sometimes autobiography includes things like Dad reading out excerpts from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at the dinner table.

Q. Are you interested in the idea of de-centralisation? For instance, of working in Adelaide, and knowing you can connect anywhere through the Internet?

A. Critical regionalismbeing here as an accidentI wouldn't have sought it, but I came to join my partner. I would really like to be right at the centre, but that was in another time, and this is right now, and here I can pursue whatever I want.

Q. How do you feel about craft practice in relation to computers? What was the process of making prodigal for instance?

A. It's a really craft-based medium. There's so much patient 'making' involved. I was looking at [the] Burning the Interface [exhibition] and my heart ached at the thought of all those hoursI wallow around for hours, it's too easy to get sucked into the vortexBut prodigal came from a handmade book I partly made some years ago that [was] never finished and I lost half the bits. Recently I was looking at stuff I did then and it still seemed relevant. My immediate reaction was to scan the work, so I did that, and then I began to add to the story and rewrite. A way of making old work visible again.

Q. What about the switch from painting and manual work? Why suddenly do it on computer?

A. I quickly realised how the immediacy of working with text and image together fuelled the leap to the next image and then someone lent me a little colour printer, and that meant instant transfer out of the machine-the whole hump of deciding what is worth taking to the bureau is a bit of a stopper really. Sometimes you need to see things off the screen to know how to proceed. An accidental process leap really, working between text and image, and a way of presenting this all at high speed, generating the next frame seamlessly. I started several stories at once then.

© Bala Starr 1996
Bala Starr is director of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide and editor of BROADsheet.

Alison Main's work Prodigal: Road Movie can be seen in Domestic Disturbances exhibition which is touring nationally through 1997-98