5 Questions with Liang Luscombe
Liang Luscombe’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and moving image that engage in a process of questioning how images and film affect audiences. She received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. She has been included in screenings at ACMI, Melbourne; Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; AceOPEN, Adelaide; MetroArts, Brisbane; OpenTV, Chicago; Comfort Station, Chicago; and Vehicle, NYC.
She has undertaken residencies at Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH residency program, Chicago, 2019; SOMA Summer, Mexico City, 2018; Australia Council Studio, British School at Rome, 2013; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Studio Residency, Perth, 2011.
(Still from Malamadre (2022), courtesy of the artist)
NO.1
As mentioned in the blurb for your upcoming short film Malamadre, the word is derived from the Spanish, from the ‘bad mother’ spider plant. Can you tell us how that connects to the themes you explore in your film, and what inspired its making?
Malamadre presents a strange matriarchal world of asexual reproduction where mothers feed on their young and deconstructed puppets of many limbs and heads, [with] Malamadre the alien ruling the land.
At the heart of it, this short film is interested in the construction of the monstrous mother in the genre of science fiction. It’s also a work that has several alien puppet characters. I was interested in the unknowable quality to both the puppet and the alien and how this informs how we conceptualise of the symbiotic relationship between human and other, something we often see in the thematic of the monstrous mother in films.
As cinema studies academic Barbara Creed famously wrote of the monstrous feminine in the 1990s about the film Alien, ‘The archaic mother is the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end. Although the archaic mother, the creature who laid the eggs, is never seen in Alien, her presence is signalled in a number of ways. She is also there in the chameleon figure of the alien, the monster as fetish-object of and for the archaic mother.’ I remember reading this and thinking about what an evocative and conflicting description this was for me. Returning to the text more recently [while making Malamadre], it made me think of how the binding together of human and puppet could allow me to think about body horror and the monstrous in interesting ways.
Relatedly, I also started working on the project after reading Octavia E. Butler’s short story ‘Blood Child’ which is about a young man named Gan has been groomed since birth to be the bearer of the alien T’Gatoi’s eggs. T’Gatoi is a Tlic, a huge worm-like creature whose species have been using humans as hosts for their young. While one can read the text in relation reproduction during African-American enslavement, Butler has talked about it as a story that focuses on questions of consent and symbiotic relationships in relation two different but entwinned life forms.
NO.2
Surrealism and humour seem to be a theme in your practice, and sure enough it returns to provide a backdrop for Malamadre. How do you think you utilise these to bring out the messages you desire to in your art?
I like to think about what comedy allows me to say [about things] that I find difficult to talk about in my day-to-day. Within this work, the main character Fran is the protagonist that is often closest to the audience in her reactions to the surrealism that takes place—such as when an alien feeds from her—so she allows us to see what a strange world the planet HOWL truly is. When I write storylines for works, I tend to introduce ideas wherein their allure is inexplicable to me: subjects like alien symbiotic relationships that elicit something of the unknowable. I recently talked about how one of my mentors, artist Vivienne Binns, would ask us where the shit was in an artwork; to me this is the part of the work that does not evade morality exactly, but perhaps allows the image to have something much less desirable, and which seeps out of the frame of the work.
I also like to introduce Freudian clichés, such as having mummy or daddy issues. I take this idea to the extreme, for example a mother that eats her babies, for comic effect. There are times where I just introduce things into a script to amuse myself, to see how it plays out, I asked myself how I could make a really low budget science fiction film.
NO.3
You’re also a painter and have also made furniture as part of your practice. Do you want to talk about your relationship to the image (whether moving or otherwise) in your work? Where do you see filmmaking sitting beside these disciplines?
Until 2016, I primarily worked in painting and sculpture. [After that] I started to write stories that became video works, which were more absurd and autobiographical and included [things such as] my love of the Muppets, filmic references, how on my 30th birthday my friend and I made thirty vegetable animals that we put around the whole house for the party, or how when I was living in the US and working a non-profit job, I would check my bank balance like three times a day because I was broke.
Coming back to your previous question about humour, in my last video Itchy IOUs (2020), fusing video-making and painting/props allowed me to humorously reflect on the primacy of debt in our lives. What does a film look like if it is structured by the act of constantly checking your bank balance? What props can be made and what can be produced that would allow us to talk about this? I think props and puppetry are interesting ways to structure and storyboard films.
NO.4
When I watched your most recent work before Malamadre, Itchy IOUs, it seemed as if the characters Fran and Sol in the latter go on to feature again, in what I view as a sequel of sorts. Can you speak more to this?
Yes it’s most definitely a sequel (although they are each stand-alone works). I think of them as an episodic series of misadventures. Fran and Sol leave Earth as it is financially too exhausting for them, and so this work starts off as a Groupon advertisement for an intergalactic tax haven holiday, but there is a catch of course. I was thinking I’d like more TV shows about Asian women dealing with surreal situations, and as there are not too many of these in the world, I thought I’d make one myself.
NO.5
What kind of experiences or feelings are you hoping to evoke with your audience(s) when you make a film? What filmmakers and/or artists influence your work and thinking?
I construct all the props and puppets [myself], so I quite physically and literally make another world that has some of the real-world problems that is about being in relation to one another: symbiotic relationships, dependency, and relationships to what is considered ‘the other’. I think this is a nice way of thinking about science fiction, as a lens to look at what is here now.
For the upcoming premiere of Malamadre, I am also screening some short films by femme artists that I am a real fan girl for: Claire Lambe’s I Think I’m turning into a Monster (2021), Ilana Harris-Babou’s Decision Fatigue (2020) and Lucy Beech’s Reproductive Exile (2018). I watched these works during the development of Malamadre and [they] relate to my work in different ways—for example, Lucy Beech fuses science fiction and contemporary research around reproductive issues in Reproductive Exile to reveal the complex biopolitical power relations within surrogacy and reproduction.
Find out more
Taken from the Spanish word for the ‘bad mother’ spider plant, Malamadre is the latest work in Liang Luscombe’s ongoing surreal comedy series that follows Sol and Fran on their intergalactic odyssey away from the financial horrors of Earth and towards the planet Howl.
Opening with a sickly Fran and a hangry alien puppet Alice, the film immediately casts doubt on the promise of Howl as a utopia. What Fran finds instead is a strange matriarchal world of asexual reproduction where mothers feed on their young. Will Fran reckon with her maternal fears and finally enjoy a symbiotic alien relationship? Moreover, will she make use of the planet’s five hundred beaches before they close at 5pm?
Malamadre premieres on Fri 8 July at 8PM, at Composite in Collingwood (VIC). To set the stage for Malamadre, the evening will begin with three short films that also circle on the theme of the monstrous mother and the femme body as a site of complex meaning: Claire Lambe’s I Think I’m turning into a Monster (2021), Ilana Harris-Babou’s Decision Fatigue (2020) and Lucy Beech’s Reproductive Exile (2018).
Tickets here. Malamadre will continue to screen during Composite's gallery hours (Wed-Fri 12pm-6pm, Sat 12pm-4pm) from 9th July until 30th July.