Misery by name but not nature

By GREG DIXON

We should probably start with the name. "Misery", after all, is a doleful nom-de-plume by any measure.

But for an artist - even one so young, who is known for her zoo-full of cute-but-curious animal characters - it's the sort of handle that has you wondering whether misery equals miserable equals woebegone.

But the name Misery, says Misery of her art-world alter ego, has nothing to do with her mood.

"I started off back in high school hanging out with taggers and graffiti people. I thought doing graffiti in spray paint that I should do lettering as well. When you pick a tag name you kind of do it for the letters. I got given the name Misery, but I think it grew from some of my characters as well because I've always drawn quite morbid, sad miserable stuff, so it suited quite well."

If her work - a growing collection of fat ladies and weird fauna which can be seen dotting walls around Auckland - is a tad sad and a bit miserable, the 21-year-old artist defines perky.

Seated at the dinner table of her flat and work studio above K Rd, Misery has the same winsome if not disturbing presence as her work. "I've always been obsessed with anything cutesy and kitsch, 50s, Bambis and bunnies and stuff."

Born Tanya Thompson in Brisbane, where she lived until she was 12, she came to Auckland with her New Zealand mother after her parents divorced.

She went to Takapuna Grammar and hated it, saying the place was cliquey and her Aussie accent made her a target for taunts. "They used to call me Skippy."

She wound up going to the now defunct Metro College in Mt Eden, a high school strong on creativity but with a reputation for letting its students do what they wanted.

"If you were passionate and knew what you wanted, Metro was the best place to be. That was where I got to work on and develop my characters. So by the time I was 16, it was, 'Right, this is what I want to do forever'. I kind of knew it."

After leaving Metro she worked in photo labs and spent a year doing visual arts at the Auckland University of Technology. It wasn't her sort of thing, she says, giggling.

"I wasn't ready for it. I just wanted to do my own thing. I was not into being told that you can't do cat cartoons. The course was very conceptual. Your art had to be based on the idea rather than the visual outcome."

With characters like Chewgum Candy - "a naughty, one-eyed cowgirl who is real mean to her cow and tries to kill it all the time" - she wasn't likely to fit.

She ditched AUT and headed back to Brisbane, to study photography at the Brisbane College of Photography in 2001. While there, she needed money to pay rent so decided to use her characters to do a line of T-shirts.

She showed her work to artist friends Martin Emond and Simon Morse at Auckland's Illicit Clothing, a company which produces a range of cartoon-art apparel. They were impressed with what they saw. She returned to Auckland and did her first line of T-shirts for Illicit last year.

"That's how the Misery thing got bigger. People knew it from the graffiti side before but it's going into a lot of different venues now."

The back street has now become main street. Misery sold out her first solo exhibition, Miseryland (a play on Disneyland - an obvious, if distorted, influence), at Auckland's Alleluya Cafe in February.

She has had successful showings in Wellington and at a small gallery run by Emond in Los Angeles, which led to some interest from toy-makers keen to turn her creatures into soft toys.

As well, Auckland band Tokey Tones commissioned her to do two covers for their just-released CDs Caterpillar and Butterfly. She has plans to make her first animated cartoons as video clips for the band.

In the meantime, she is planning another exhibition at Alleluya next month, a show which will feature her first 3-D characters. You would have to say that such quick success is hardly likely to have bred misery for Misery. But has it surprised her?

"Yeah," she laughs, "Every day I'm like, 'What?' It's insane. It's so overwhelming how many people are into it. It kind of scares me. I'm lucky my work appeals to a lot of people, not just little punky kids or hip-hop kids or graffiti kids.

"Older people dig it and fashion people dig it. I think it's the cuteness. But there's also a quirky side that people can see. My characters are kind of cheeky and cute, and people like that."