In conversation with Tommy Carman: “Taking a step back and slowing down became one of the most valuable parts of the residency”

For Australian artist Tommy Carman, a residency is not simply a period of production but a chance to examine the conditions that shape how and why we work. Now nearly two months into his London residency at Fire Station as the second recipient of the Prudence MacLeod Prize through the National Art School, questions that have long underpinned his practice have taken on a new immediacy. Researching the historical roots of contemporary work culture while navigating the freedoms and pressures of a work/live studio, Tommy finds himself confronting many of the same forces his work seeks to understand.

In this conversation, he reflects on the transition from competitive boxing to art, the influence of philosophy and social theory on his practice, and how London, alongside the unique conditions of residency life, is shaping the direction of his work.

Could you tell us a bit about your background as an artist and what brought you to London?

My background, I guess, is somewhat unusual. I came from a sporting background. I started training in Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu from the age of 15. I then transitioned to competing as a boxer and anticipated doing exercise physiology after school.

Then I took a gap year. During that time, I was reading a lot of philosophy - I couldn't always understand it or apply it much, but something clicked and I realised art was a way to access these ideas without needing to understand someone like Hegel [German philosopher]. Art became a way of exploring or implementing these ideas in a way that was more accessible to me. I grew up drawing. I was a pretty shy only child and spent a lot of time drawing knights and Star Wars and making my own little worlds, so art was always part of my life. But after high school something just clicked and I told my mum, "I'm going to go to art school instead."

I was still boxing during art school. By my third year, I wanted to put all my eggs in the art basket and let the sport go, but it stayed with me. Themes of competition and ambition stuck with me, and the discipline that was part of boxing transferred to art making.

There are often assumptions that sport and art occupy very different worlds. Did moving from sport into art feel like a jump?

No, actually, it felt like they went hand in hand. There are some precedents for it. Yves Klein [French artist] was a black belt in judo, and there are other artists with martial arts backgrounds.

One of the reasons I switched to boxing after kickboxing and Jiu Jitsu was that I really liked the way you moved. It was very rhythmic and fluid. I enjoyed that – it felt a bit more artistic.

There seems to be a strong sense of embodiment in your practice. Does your sporting background inform the way you create?

Yeah. In the past I've made works that were very focused on labour and the psychology surrounding it. The process was entirely governed by it being laborious, requiring a lot of time and energy. It was a repetitive, quasi-meditative process, but it also involved a lot of physical strain.

I think some of the wall paintings and larger-scale works are physically involved as well. You're working across a couple of metres, up and down and across, so your body is very present in the process.

What was your experience of art school like?

I was a bit of an art school normie [laughs]. There were the skaters, the psychonauts and all these different groups, and I was just kind of an average guy geeking out about art. I was quite a nerd. Definitely the teacher's pet at times [laughs].

I was very invested in art history and theory, and I spent most of my time at art school. They shut the gates at 10 pm, so I would stay as late as possible and maximise my time there.

I went straight through to a Masters [at National Art School in Sydney]. I started it during COVID and eventually needed a year off because I was trying too many different things and exploring too many avenues at once. I think I overwhelmed myself. I took a year off to work in the art ecosystem, then came back and told myself: just put paint on a flat surface, keep it within those parameters.

After that I was lucky enough to start showing work quite soon after graduating, and that momentum carried me through.

During art school, did your ideas about the purpose or value of art change?

Yeah, I grappled with it a lot. There were times when I was really concerned about what value art had today. It seems like quite a niche world now, and I spent a lot of time questioning what function art had.

I never arrived at any resolute understanding. I think I learned over time that being dogmatic about what art should do or what it is was self-defeating. I increasingly understood what value it had to me, and that helped contextualise what value it might have for others.

It oscillates from optimistic to pessimistic. I don't necessarily approach a work philosophically. Often if I go to a gallery, I'll just stare at something for a while and let things percolate. You might walk away with no concrete thoughts but have enjoyed staring at it. It's a lot more intuitive and sympathetic.

Your art moves between different mediums. How do you decide which ideas become wall paintings, canvases, or other forms?

There are practical concerns alongside conceptual ones. With the airbrush, I can only get a mark so small, whereas with a paintbrush you can work at a much finer scale. If I'm invested in capturing a lot of detail, scaling it up onto a wall suits the airbrush.

The wall paintings appeal to me because they maximise the flatness of the painting. It's as flat as it can get. There's no intermediate support. The image is applied directly to the wall and is architecturally embedded in the space. Those are all factors that come into play.

Canvas is a lot more forgiving because you can stretch another one or throw it out. A lot of the more experimental avenues happen on canvas. When I first moved into this studio, I was really eager to make a wall painting, so I painted a two-metre wall from edge to edge. I took some risks that failed completely and botched it. I couldn't stand waking up to it, so I painted it white again. If I did that in a gallery, it would be a nightmare.

Beyond questions of medium and scale, where does the imagery and ideas in your work come from?

The works all feed into one another. I love reading and scouring around, and I try to be quite porous and receptive to influences. I catalogue things, write down phrases, download images and collect material.

Often things start on a smaller scale. I might introduce new elements or transpose something from one work into another and explore that avenue. Once something feels more consolidated and I'm confident enough to risk putting it on a wall, that's usually when it moves to a larger scale.

It's all very fluid, but I try for the works to remain networked. I often jump back and forth between abstraction and figuration, and they sometimes overlap.

The way you describe cataloguing images, texts and visual material sounds almost archival. Do you think of that collection as a kind of archive, and how does it function within your practice?

Yeah, it's not very structured, but there's definitely an index. For example, there are the source images from 2025, then the subsequent Photoshop files made from them, then scans of the results. Everything is quite neurotically labelled.

I revisit things and pull them back out of that index. Reading is a big influence, and if I read something and then go back to the images, they can be entirely recontextualised. Something can suddenly take on a whole new meaning or become usable in a different way.

Reading and language seem to occupy an important place in your practice, alongside images. What interests you about bringing text into your works?

I initially started using text during one of those periods where I was questioning the value of art. I was reading about a lot of artworks, and sometimes the writing around them was more compelling to me than the images themselves. It almost felt like I didn't need to see the artwork. The text was what interested me.

That catalysed my desire to start using text as a direct means of communication. I discovered artists like Jenny Holzer and Roni Horn, and I admired the clarity of expression in the way that they used language.

That led me to explore how text and image could relate to one another, how they could inform one another, cover or subsume one another, and play with meaning. It felt like something you could spend a lifetime exploring.

I became interested in different styles of language as well, whether it's a direct, disembodied voice speaking at you or a more personal voice, and the different effects those approaches produce alongside different images.

Do you then see writing as part of your practice? Or is it more about building a repository of material to draw from?

There is the cataloguing of phrases and things, but I also write quite extensively myself. I transcribe notes from books I've read and footnote them -it's super geeky stuff [laughs].

I find writing helpful for organising my thoughts because otherwise everything can become too fluid. That said, it feels like pulling teeth. It's probably the thing I procrastinate on most. I have to do every chore under the sun before I sit down and force myself to write.

Did you arrive at the residency with a clear idea of what you wanted to work on, or were you hoping to discover new directions?

I think conceptually I'm relatively governed by what I proposed. In terms of making, that's a lot more fluid and open. Already, there's been a lot of stimulus to move the work elsewhere, but the premise has remained fairly consistent.

I was interested in competition, ambition and the psychology surrounding those things. I came across the German social psychologist Erich Fromm, who wrote Fear of Freedom during the rise of Nazism. He was looking at the willingness of people to relinquish their freedom to authority figures in order to alleviate anxiety and existential doubt.

What struck me was how many parallels there seem to be today, with people willingly surrendering a sense of agency. One of Fromm's arguments was that the Protestant Reformation provided a historical context for this psychology. He traced how shifts in Protestant morality and teaching had long-term psychological ramifications that still influence the way we think about work and ambition and even helped lay some of the foundations for capitalism and free-market competition.

Was that the moment when those questions around ambition and competition started to crystallise for you?

As soon as I read that, it felt like a lightbulb moment. Suddenly there was a whole field of thinking that gave structure to something I was already interested in but didn't yet have a framework for. That led me into a lot more reading, and London became particularly relevant because it was one of the major sites of the Reformation and remains a global financial centre. You can still feel the ways those histories continue to shape contemporary life.

I guess I also felt this internal compulsion to work hard and be productive. It's what people now call "grind culture". I love London, but you definitely get a sense of the rat race here in a way I haven't felt elsewhere.

Has researching these ideas changed the way you think about your own drive to work?

Definitely. In sport, competition is inherently self-justified. You don't really have to question it. There are winners and losers, and that's the premise of the whole thing.

In the arts, it's a little more under the surface. It's almost taboo to be openly ambitious or competitive, but those dynamics are still there. There's a phrase in Australia, "tall poppy syndrome", where if one person starts to stand out, there's a tendency to cut them down.

I've been very fortunate that most of the people I've worked with and been mentored by have been incredibly generous, so it's not something I've experienced directly in a serious way. But I've certainly seen it around, and I've definitely felt jealousy, competitiveness and ambition myself.

Do you see those feelings as useful motivators, or more something to be wary of?

Sometimes those impulses can be productive, and sometimes they're completely counterproductive. You can find yourself wanting to make more paintings than the next person, and suddenly you're just producing work for the sake of producing work. The work itself becomes less considered.

Making that tension a focus of my research has helped me step outside it a little and look at it critically. I'm still guilty of it from time to time, but hopefully less so. I'm always impressed by those people who seem completely immune to those pressures. They feel like angels in the art world.

To what extent does place shape your work, and how has London influenced what you've been making?

For a long time, I worked primarily from material sourced online. I wasn't especially interested in internet art; it was simply a way of finding images and subjects I cared about.

Since arriving in London, though, I've been working much more from photographs and source material gathered here. I also spent some time in Oxford on a small research trip. The work has become much more location-specific, and that's been really fruitful.

When you're searching online, you can scan endlessly in every direction. But when your source material is tied to a particular place and culture, you start noticing recurring traits and patterns. Instead of widening the search, you deepen it.

What fascinates me about London is that it's simultaneously steeped in history and at the forefront of contemporary culture.

Has having a dedicated live-work studio changed the way you think about your practice?

As soon as I walked in, my eyes lit up. I thought, where else do you get this much wall space and have people actively encouraging you to paint on it rather than asking what you're doing to their property?

At first, though, I found it surprisingly difficult. Suddenly my work was available to me twenty-four hours a day. If I wasn't working, I felt guilty.

Back home I was making work around a day job. I'd have a few hours in the evening and then I'd have to stop because I needed to get up the next morning. Here, there were no external limits. I could just keep going indefinitely.

Residencies are often imagined as periods of complete freedom, but that doesn’t always make things easier.

Yeah, it took me a little while to negotiate that. Eventually I realised the pressure I was putting on myself was completely counterproductive. Taking a step back and slowing down became one of the most valuable parts of the residency.

I've become much more comfortable sitting in silence, staring at things, letting ideas percolate, and allowing work to develop more slowly. I think the work has become more considered because of that.

Interestingly, because I was already researching the Protestant work ethic and ideas around labour, productivity and the internal taskmaster, I found myself experiencing those concepts very directly. The research became something I was feeling as much as thinking about.

How have you navigated those challenges?

A lot of it came through conversations with people I trust. I have a few older friends back in Sydney, including an artist and a curator, who were really good voices of reason and helped me pull back and see things more holistically.

At the same time, I was reading all this material about labour and productivity, so I could see where these feelings were coming from. Rather than just feeling overwhelmed by them, I could understand them as part of a larger framework.

That made it easier to channel those feelings into the work itself. Instead of simply falling prey to that mindset, I could try to manoeuvre around it, think through it, and find ways to give it visual expression. It's still an ongoing negotiation, but I think I'm getting better at it.

Has the Fire Station itself influenced your work in other ways?

Definitely. One of the nice things about the Fire Station is that it feels slightly removed from the frenetic pace of London. You can tune a lot of that out and focus more intensely on what you're doing.

The area has also filtered into the work in small ways. There are lots of newer apartment developments around here, and I'm quite drawn to some of their monochromatic panels and colour combinations. They're a bit kitsch, but I genuinely love them. Sometimes they feel almost like something from SimCity [laughs].

I also find myself looking out at the industrial landscape and construction sites around the building. There's something interesting about the relationship between all those new developments and the infrastructure surrounding them. Those observations have started feeding into my thinking visually.

What are you looking forward to exploring during the rest of the residency?

Most of the wall paintings I've made so far have still been contained within rectangular formats, almost like conventional paintings transferred onto a wall.

The next thing I'm excited about is treating the walls less like oversized canvases and more like theatrical sets or backdrops. Rather than confining things to a rectangle, I want to think about how wall paintings might interact with other paintings, objects or installations within the room.

I'm interested in creating a more integrated environment, where different elements of the space can speak to one another. The residency gives me a rare opportunity to experiment with that kind of spatial thinking, and that's probably the direction I'm most excited to pursue over the coming weeks.

It sounds like you're embracing the opportunity to follow ideas without worrying too much about the outcome. Has that been one of the pleasures of the residency?

It's kind of awesome, just waking up bleary-eyed, having a coffee, and staring at the wall, like maybe I should do that thing today. Your biggest problem of the day is, should I make this painting blue or red? If that's the hardest decision you have to make in a day, life's pretty good, you know.

Tommy Carman situates painting within a broader examination of work, competition, and the internalisation of social expectations, using labour as both a subject and strategy. He graduated with a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School, Sydney, in 2022. He was a finalist of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship prize in 2024, and was the recipient of the Bird Holcomb Foundation scholarship in 2019. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at LAILA, Mega, and Chauffeur, and a two-person show with Corey Black at Sydenham International.

National Art School

NAS is Australia’s leading fine art school, with an intensive and enriching studio-based teaching model that has nurtured many of the country’s most renowned artists. NAS currently offers recent alumni and academic staff residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris and British School at Rome.

For more information visit https://nas.edu.au/.