INTERVIEW: Anastasia Beasley

Meet Anastasia Beasley, an artist, arts manager and long-time Propel friend who’s bringing Tea & Symphony and Postcards From Here to the 2021 Youth Week WA KickstART Festival. We sat down with Anastasia to talk about who she is and the events she’s hosting in April and what the 2021 Youth Week WA theme ‘Our Path’ means to her. 

Anastasia Beasley. Photo credit: Anastasia Beasley.

Who are you, what do you do? 

I am an artist and arts manager. When I’m making my own art, it’s normally focused on exploring new skills and new materials. I work with a lot of stuff that’s broken, stuff that I’ve found on the verge, stuff that has been thrown out, and in order to fix things, make new things out of the junk. I have learned some weird skills and things that I didn’t think I needed to know, I’m still very much in the process of learning. 

 Where did working with broken objects and fixing things come from? 

When I was very little, my favourite thing ever was Meccano which are little bits of metal that you can join together to make anything. They're strips of metal with holes in them and you can bolt  it  together into another piece to make wheels or a little motorbike or a crane, you can make all sorts of stuff just by fitting things with knobs or undoing them. That was one of my interest in making things and seeing how things work. I’ve also done some work at my Dad’s work where they dismantle cars, clean up the parts and sell them. It’s really interesting to take things apart that was once useless and to find value in them again. 

What are your tips for sustainability?  

I think a lot of it is planning because a lot of unnecessary wastage comes up in situations where you're unprepared. You know, plastic bags when you don’t bring your own bags. Or today, I try to catch the train as much as possible but I got distracted from watching memes and I had to drive my way here because I was going to run late. It’s just poor planning. When I plan ahead and have things in order it’s not just sustainable, it’s also good for my mental state because I stay on top of things. 

Snart Club. Photo credit: Anastasia Beasley.

What is Snart Club? 

Snart Club started in 2018 when Zoë and I decided to do a project for Science Week, The Re-invention Room. That was really hard but also really fun, we made machines out of junk that generated electricity. They were really silly, fun machines. We had one where you would crank a wheel around and it would light up the eyes of a rubber chicken we found in some dusty corner, we called it the evil chicken machine. 

That was a very typical Snart Club project, we also had a microbial fuel cell where we could generate electricity from a bucket of dirt. And the objective of that was to show people how hard it was to make electricity so that they would understand that when they switch a light on, a lot of trees and animals died six billion years ago that made coal, that we dug out of the earth, that we burned, that we boiled water with, and that we transported through wires to get to your house, so much for just one moment.  

Since then we’ve had different projects like the Bee Day Picnic where we explored Kings Park and tried to tap into the senses bees use such as how bees use the polarisation of the sky to navigate and use weak electric fields of flowers to see which flowers have been recently visited by other bees.  

We’ve narrowed down Snart Club to five key elements which is recycling, community, curiosity, learning and fun. 

What will your workshop Postcards From Here look like? 

Postcards From Here is a really lovely opportunity to check in with yourself and to appreciate your surroundings. It's about what your sense of place is, how you perceive here, and what here means to you right now.It’s kind of a reflective exercise and you get to notice what stands out to you the most, a thought in your head that keeps coming back or maybe there’s a chair in the room that you really like. Whatever comes to mind about where you are right now, you just get to appreciate that, and send a postcard to the rest of the world.  

A lot of the times in life we have to communicate where we’re at to other people especially if it’s in a situation where there’s conflict, you have to be able to explain what you’re going through so that people can understand where you’re at and what you’re going to do. We love the idea of postcards because you typically send postcards from a place your family and friends haven’t visited but really, you’re always in a place where they haven’t visited because you’re in a combination of a physical space, mental space and a point in time where no one else has visited before. So the workshop is just to showcase where you are and to exchange little messages. 

Postcards from here. Photo credit: Anastasia Beasley.

Going back to what you said about communication, what do you think the best way is to communicate?

Right now, there’s definitely a big focus on mindfulness and being present but also realistically a lot of people aren’t. We’re always distracted by our phones or the people around us, or something that we forgot to do. I could be in the most important meeting of my life and if I didn’t water my plants that morning, I’d just be sitting there thinking “Oh no, I didn’t water my plants!!”. 

It’s fine, it’s what you’re feeling in the moment. I think it’s good to just go back to it and notice it, and realise that you’re not actually fully there, and when you realise you’re not fully there it’s great to know that and tell other people that because you might not be listening to them. It’s so important, it saves people’s feelings a lot because you can tell when someone’s not really listening to you. It helps as well to assess where you’re at, to notice it and change it if you’re not happy with it. 

What will Tea & Symphony look like? You hosted it for the first time last year and now we’re bringing it back again for free this time for KickstART. Why should people come? 

You should come because it’s fun! The reason I created Tea & Symphony is to make a gig that’s really easy to see. Rather than going to a late night gig surrounded by a lot of people and lights, where you have to catch the train home late at night afterwards, and where you feel drained, it’s a refreshing experience. This gig is where you just wander in in the afternoon, chill out on a bean bag and have a cup of tea. Everyone’s sort of smiling and enjoying music, and you feel really replenished by it.

Tea & Symphony. Photo credit: Anastasia Beasley.

You’re also part of our Youth Week WA 2021 Committee, what is your interpretation of the Youth Week WA 2021 theme ‘Our Path?’ 

We had a lot of discussion leading up to that theme and I think we made a good choice in encompassing what came up about the compromise between individuality and community. You have to find the path that's right for you, and be true to yourself; but you also have to acknowledge that learning from those who went before you is a vital part of imagining your future. We can still learn from the older generations who are passing the world to us to take care of, even if we aren't happy with everything they did. To me ‘Our Path’ means all of our individual paths are different but they converge, they meet and then follow on from one another. 

What has your path looked like? What does it look like now? And where is it going? 

Where do I start… when I was in school I loved doing art and drama. I’ve always loved being creative and being able to exercise that part of my brain. When I went to uni, I did Arts Management,  where there’s still room for creativity but you have to follow a lot of rules and a lot of the time you’re actually carrying out other people’s ideas rather than your own. Although my first instinct out of uni was that I had to find a full-time permanent job, whilst looking around for jobs and applying for a few, I realised that I would actually hate that. It was mainly due to not having the attention span to sit in one place and do the same thing for eight hours. That’s why I chose specifically not to have a full time permanent job. I’m also really excited to do my own creative projects so I kind of set aside this year to do music, to do code, to finish the Soup Machine, an old electronic typewriter that’s going to generate song lyrics. It’s called the Soup Machine for reasons I can’t remember. I want to expand my electronic skills and do more Snart and more performance art. I’m really excited to collaborate with new people for Snart: noise musicians, people who do live coding to produce music, Symbiotica, there are so many people I want to talk to. 

What about the past? Who do you acknowledge that’s helped you in the past? 

When we were doing The Reinvention Room, it was fantastic to meet Clarie Pannel, because she’s very punk and she does whatever she wants. She breaks things to make new things. She’s not afraid to just hack things together which I admire. The people who were working on their own projects at The Art Factory in Osborne Park were also really generous with their time and knowledge. I would always go in there and be doing something and people would come up and ask what I was making and I’d say something weird like a haunted chicken machine. They wouldn't even question it, they'd actually offer to show me how to use different tools to make a better haunted chicken machine. They were just so generous with their time and knowledge, they helped me to grow a lot. I really appreciated the community there.  

In your own words, how do you live your best life? 

Something I realised recently was that there was one benefit of being in a really strict school structure and that was that you had to choose different subjects. Let’s say there are six different subjects and you have six hours a day at school and you do different subjects every hour. I didn’t realise that my brain was actually really missing that when I left school. Even though I hated sports I missed doing it, and now because it’s not scheduled in I never exercise. Realising that I need all of those different elements including physical activity and creativity was really important. Working in a way that is meaningful and helpful to others is also something that I need include in my life. 

Join Anastasia on Tuesday 13 April for Tea & Symphony or Wednesday 14 April for Postcards From Here, both events are presented as part of the Youth Week WA KickstART Festival 2021. Keep up to date with Anastasia on her Instagram and follow Snart Club on Instagram.

INTERVIEW BY: YOSHIKA KON & MAGGIE LEUNG.