Natasha Cantwell is a New Zealand filmmaker and photographer, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. We screened her Meat trilogy: The Solar System (In Luncheon Meat), Meat and Claws, which “explore the artist’s personal sense of wonder and unease around the aesthetic qualities of meat.” Her work is buoyant and sinister, poppy and somber, delightful and disconcerting to watch. She also has an uncanny knack for inviting the viewer with warm, saturated colors and natural light, then throwing them off with severed chicken feet dancing in-sync with a snappy tune. Natasha Cantwell is one of the hard-working, innovative, artist-of-all-trades that the New Zealand milieu, every so often, will produce. Refreshing.

-Rosie Rowe

Your work spans music videos, fashion photography and editorial work, and you program and make films, in particular 16mm film. How did you get started?

I started with a photograph of my dad and sister posing in front of our concrete mixer. I’d received my mum’s old camera for my 10th birthday and seriously couldn’t wait until something ‘worth taking a photo of’ happened. As my mum paid for the film and developing, I was encouraged to only take photos on holidays and special occasions. After 8 years of shooting bleak landscapes, birthdays and zoo animals, I embarked on a Bachelor of Graphic Design at AUT. I called my work fashion photography, except there was never any fashion, as such – just my friends, wearing clothes or not. My influences included the idealised beauty of Sofia Coppola’s work and the ‘anti-fashion’ photography of Corinne Day from the 1990s. Out in the real world, I was told that my work wasn’t fashion, but magazines commissioned me as an art photographer. Then, I was commissioned as an art photographer to do fashion shoots. Once I was shooting regularly for several magazines, it became irrelevant whether my work was fashion or not. I felt really lucky to be involved with magazines such as Staple, Frankie and NO.

And as a filmmaker?

A friend had a 16mm Bolex camera that sat in the corner of his bedroom, next to the bathroom door, for about 10 years. He’s a talented photographer and a movie fanatic, so his intention was to learn to use it. But shooting on 16mm can seem like an impossible dream, even when the camera is right there. His decision to finally sell it on ebay spurred me into action. I bought it from him, got it serviced, watched some YouTube tutorials and realised it wasn’t any harder to use than my SLR!

It did, however, require a new way of approaching art-making. It’s kind of weird to spend your whole life creating single frames, then suddenly you have what seems like all the possibilities in the world to work with. Starting out, I simply made moving photographs, but with each new work I managed to break down a bit more of my photographer’s way of thinking. I’ve been working with 16mm since 2013, but I still feel like I’m in an exciting phase, where there’s so much to discover about editing, sound and movement.

Why did you choose 16mm?

Before buying the Bolex I already knew that if I were going to shoot moving image, it would be on 16mm. I’m an analogue nerd, and I can’t think of anything more beautiful than the way film captures light. As a photographer I work with 35mm. Shooting on film is also integral to my working process. I want to physically capture the colours and tones at the source, not spend hours reinterpreting it through editing software afterwards. I had shot super-8 a few times previously and, while there’s definitely a place for the soft fuzzy glow of the smaller gauge film, I knew that the gritty detail of 16mm suited me better.

How do all these media intersect for you?

Projects often flow on from one another. For example, the positive experience of having my films play at different festivals around the world motivated me to organise the Auckland Underground Film Festival. I think, in New Zealand, it feels natural to always be working across different types of projects and learning new skills. Even though I’m now based in Melbourne, I still have that mindset of wanting to be involved in everything that interests me and if it doesn’t exist, I’ll make it exist! I find that producing, programming and curating counteracts the introspection of being an artist, and collaborating with a team on fashion shoots stops me from becoming too precious about my work.

Is there anyone you especially appreciate and look to for inspiration?

If I had to choose the one piece of work that I relate to the most, I couldn’t go past Twin Peaks. Having spent the early part of my childhood in the forestry town of Tokoroa, I always felt an undue affinity for the titular logging town. Lynch is masterful at combining the disturbing, joyous, odd and beautiful elements into a supernatural horror soap-opera.

I also love work that examines reality, such as Helen Levitt’s colour photography from the 1970s, where she captures quietly absurd moments of everyday life in New York. I’m a huge fan of 20th-century street photography in general, but her work is so rich that I feel like I’ve seen an entire movie, just in one frame. I’ve always been impressed by photographers who’s lightning quick reflexes can snap a candid moment and still manage to get the composition and lighting just as perfect as a film-still that had a hundred people behind the scenes making sure everything is right. Plus, her dye-transfer colour prints are just stunning.

An aspect of your films that I really appreciate is the choice of colour in your frames: saturated, warm colours that feel inspired by nature. Does this quality represent a personal philosophy?

My nana is obsessed with colour. When she put her house on the market, she painted the entire interior in all different rainbow colours. Bright gaudy mismatched tones – just what the folk in Palmerston North are looking for! I’ll admit, it looked truly terrible, but not any worse than the shades of grey and beige that everyone else seems to prefer. I think colour gets a bad rep, and people like my nana probably aren’t helping. I’ve never consciously thought about my colour palette being inspired by nature, but thinking about it now I would say yes! In nature there are so many vivid colours, but they’re always harmonious. I use colour to welcome the viewer in.

I screened your films Meat, The Solar System (In Luncheon Meat) and Claws. What does meat represent to you?

It represents a conundrum. The colours, textures and shapes are so beautiful, and yet these are dead bodies and yet again it’s just food.