S1E7: Emily McCulloch Childs
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In this interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Jenny talks with curator, writer and art historian Emily McCulloch Childs. Emily loves diaries, life writing, and writers’ journals; her own earliest diary (velveteen-covered, horse-emblazoned) dates to when she was 10.
Jenny and Emily talk about how they first met as anonymous bloggers in the 2010s, the freedom of not having to be ‘writery’ on their blogs, the sense of liberation that anonymity gave, and how blogging could become a kind of online diary.
They discuss diaries as a cultural snapshot, and as revealing not only the inner life of the diarist, but of the other people around us while we are writing. They ask: do we write diaries to record, or to process, or both? And they consider the act of going back to the past and reading old diaries; how does it make us feel?
Emily McCulloch Childs is a curator, writer, art historian, researcher, gallerist, publisher, fundraiser and maker, co-author & publisher of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art and McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, and author of New Beginnings: Classic Paintings from the Corrigan Collection of 21st century Aboriginal Art.
Since 2003 she has been co-director of art company McCulloch & McCulloch with her mother, Susan McCulloch. They began exhibiting art in 2009, and established a home gallery at their family house ‘Whistlewood’ on the Mornington Peninsula, with a focus on Aboriginal art. In 2019 they opened Everywhen Artspace in Flinders, and now work with over 40 communities, 300 artists and 25 Aboriginal owned NFP art centres.
Since 2013 Emily has been the founding curator of The Indigenous Jewellery Project, Australia’s first national contemporary jewellery project working with Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander jewellers.
In this episode:
Emily’s artist family, grew up surrounded by artists, writers, musicians
Her own current ‘making’ practice, jewellery
The Dadaist and Surrealist movement and other of Emily’s influences
Emily transcribed poetry and wrote original poetry
Emily always wanted to be a music journalist, resisted being an artist from very young, as a child; preferred to be in the curation space
In Emily’s earliest diary, 12 years old in 1988, reading Helen Garner, ‘I need to write a diary because I’m reading Monkey Grip’
Emily’s parents lived in same street at HG when Emily young
Emily’s grandfather wrote two books based on his diaries (incidentally he was rescued by Liz Taylor’s father – yes, that Liz Taylor – while he was trying to cross the Mojave Desert)
She did little cartoon sketches in her diaries but never used as the equivalent of an artist’s visual diary
Emily’s mother told her, ‘I will never read your diaries’
Digital writing, or rather, digital archiving – Emily has so many hard drives, will we lose that concrete archival mass of material? Is hard copy better?
During lockdown Emily wrote a series of love poems, to trees
From Six of the Best, Elizabeth David’s pesto recipe
Find out more about McCulloch & McCulloch/Everywhen Artspace at everywhenart.com.au
Emily’s articles, exhibition reviews, catalogue essays and artist interviews can be found at emilymccullochchilds.com
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.
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