The indigenous artist is inspired by the sea
This self-taught indigenous artist is on a roll after completing work for the Australian actor and at Brisbane store of the luxury fashion house.
Otis Hope Carey has painted several large-scale murals in his career, but he thinks his latest – for Louis Vuitton’s Brisbane flagship store – is his best yet. Just don’t tell Chris Hemsworth.
In 2019, Carey painted a huge mural in Hemsworth’s sprawling Byron Bay mansion. When it was completed, the actor posted a photograph of the work to his Instagram account with a caption reading: “Had a big empty wall that needed some love and was beyond thankful to have one of my favourite artists @otishopecarey help out!” The post has since attracted more than 1.5 million likes.
Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, had a huge staircase that descends from the ground floor of its new Brisbane home to the basement-level menswear department. The heritage-listed neoclassical building on Queen Street was originally built in 1929 for the National Australia Bank and has since been transformed into a bright, open and opulent store for the luxury brand, spread over three levels.
Carey was commissioned to create a site-specific artwork to cover the walls of the staircase and, in the process, entice shoppers to the building’s lower level.
“I’m calling it the best I’ve ever done,” he says. “There’s nothing like the angles [of the staircase]. It was such a challenging mural, but as I was working on it, I just knew it was going to flow and turn out beautiful.”
The mural took 15 days to paint and was done while builders were hurriedly putting the finishing touches to the new store. The artwork is an interpretation of Carey’s Gumbaynggirr clan totem, Gaagal (the ocean). Carey’s distinctive depiction of Gaagal essentially combines two layers of linework. The first layer uses traditional symbols – concentric circles – that are exaggerated and expanded to represent water and the way it moves in ripples when struck by rain, wind or a rock. The top layer also references Gaagal, this time through a representation of tidal charts and wave currents.
Carey, who is entirely self-taught, always references the ocean in his work. “The ocean has so many powerful healing elements to it, and to be honest I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t have the ocean,” he says. “I want to share these connections [through my work] and what the ocean has given me.”
Before he took up the paintbrush, Carey, a Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man, was a professional surfer. These days he says he only competes in Indigenous surfing competitions. “For me competitive surfing is about sharing the water with others,” he says. “I just do the Indigenous surfing comps now purely for the fact that it’s more of a gathering than a competition.”
Carey was born in Grafton and grew up in Coffs Harbour on the NSW north coast. But it was while living in Sydney that he discovered painting could have a similar therapeutic effect to being in the ocean. “I was living in Sydney, I was super depressed, and I had a shit job working in a warehouse,” he recalls. “My therapist said, why don’t you just try and paint something, paint how you feel. So I started painting. It happened naturally, it just flowed out of me.
“I have always wanted to share my culture but could never find a way how. And then it just sort of translated into painting and stories about my culture and it just blossomed from there.”
In 2020, he was a finalist in the Wynne Prize for landscape painting and had a solo show at China Heights Gallery in Sydney. The following year, he created a cloak worn by Hemsworth for his lead role in Thor: Love and Thunder. He is also an advocate for mental health awareness. “I’m always willing to talk about my battles with depression, because I still battle with it,” he says. “Painting has helped. I find now that I have the tools and the avenue to express myself, and it’s opened up windows for people who don’t feel comfortable talking about their mental health. I think that’s a beautiful thing. Everyone deserves to feel comfortable to talk to someone about how they feel.”
The mezzanine level of the Brisbane Louis Vuitton store houses a gallery space that is curated in conjunction with China Heights Gallery. The intention is that the space will feature a new exhibit four times a year. For the store’s opening, an exhibition by Carey was created in collaboration with another Indigenous artist, and a close friend of Carey, Shaun Daniel Allen (also known as Shal). Titled Where the River Meets the Ocean, it will run until July.
The show is a series of canvases, some of which the two artists painted together; others they did on their own. When Carey returns to the store for his interview with WISH, it’s the first time he has seen all the works hung together.
“We are really close friends, me and Shal,” he says. “I paint the ocean and he sort of paints the rhythm of the river and the two together … it’s like the works respect each other. It means a lot to us.”
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