Toby Zoates @ the Tinsheds

Toby Zoates art: Part 1 1977-1986 | Part 2 - 1987-2019 | Part 3 - 2020+ | Tin Sheds |

Sedition exhibition, State Library of New South Wales, 2019. Toby Zoates White Bay Anti-uranium Protest poster, 1977, top centre, orange and black. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Early in 1977 the Melbourne-born artist and performer Toby Zoates (b. 1949) arrived in Sydney from India, following a five year adventure travelling throughout that region and the adjacent Himalayas (Zoates 2017). Rather then return home to Melbourne, Toby decided on settling in Sydney, at least in the short term. It appeared to him, at that time, that Sydney possessed a more lively arts and entertainment scene, along with offering the possibility of engagement with the local film industry. 1977 was in many ways the peak of the burgeoning Australian rock music scene, and Punk was exploding around the world,  adding an element of new wave, energetic excitement. Toby was a gay man, and the scene in Sydney was about to enter a new, more public phases, with the staging of the first Mardi Grad street parade in 1978, with Toby an active participant. He was also a decided outsider, though his talent in a variety of areas was obvious. He had been sketching since youth, was a competent writer, and his imagination - spurred on by the use of drugs such as LSD and his encounters with Eastern philosophies - was distinct and edgy. Toby soon set out to engage with locals, and this brought him into contact with the community-based arts workshop known as the Tin Sheds, operated on land owned by the University of Sydney and located on the edge of its main campus, next to the Parramatta Road at Darlington.

The story of the Tin Sheds is relatively well-known, especially in regard to the foundation years (1972-80). This is the result of the subsequent fame of many of its participants, and books and related exhibitions such as Under a Hot Tin Roof (Kenyon 1995) and Girls at the Tin Sheds (Yuill 2015). In all of these public displays and commentary on the history and heritage of the Tin Sheds, Toby Zoates fails to get a mention. He was not seen as a Tin Shed artist during its lifetime by those who were its core participants, and had not been recognised subsequently. This is despite the fact that between 1977 and 1987 he was at times very active and printed at least 21 different posters there, utilising the silk-screen process taught him by founding members such as Chips Mackinolty and Michael Callaghan (Organ 2019).

Toby's distinctive use of bright, dayglo inks in turn influenced those same artists into brightening up their works beyond the traditional, flat colour palette. A good example is Michael Callaghan and his work with the Wollongong-based Redback Graphix through the late seventies and early eighties. Toby had adopted vivid colours largely as a result of his experiences in India, where temple art and apparel was often extremely colourful. The use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD enhanced this experience and preference for the use of bright colours, as it had done to the psychedelic artists of San Francisco and London around 1966-8 and the so-called 1967 Summer of Love. His posters made use of the seven colours of the rainbow, where feasible, and as a result stood out amongst the work of his fellow Tin Shed screen printers. Toby never received any formal training as a artist, and his skills at drawing were rudimentary. However, his imagination was vivid and distinct, with pop culture artists such as the American Robert Crumb an obvious influence. The result was often anarchic, political, and, as mentioned, edgy. This did not necessarily fit in with the prevailing Tin Sheds zeitgeist, thereby placing Toby ever on the outer. Whether his gayness was a factor is unclear, though his outsider nature, in part the result of youthful trauma, may also have played a part, overriding his natural inclination to actively engage with, and support, the community about him.

In regard to the first poster he produced at the Tin Sheds, Toby noted in a blog posting on 21 April 2017:

When I first came to Sydney in '77 I got arrested in the White Bay anti-uranium riots and, to raise the money to pay the fines of all involved, I organized a rock concert at Balmain Town Hall with up and coming rock legends "Mad As Cut Snakes" [i.e. Mental as Anything]. I went to the Tin Sheds Poster Workshop at Sydney University to silkscreen the poster for the event - [titled] "Blood on the Streets" - designing it like a Z-grade '50s noir movie, [with] lurid black and white photos from the press showing cops dragging protesters by their hair, dripping all over with red blood lettering. The gang who ran the Tin Sheds called themselves the "Earthworks Poster Collective" and they were much impressed by "Blood on the Streets".

Zoates' interaction with the Tin Sheds evolved during 1978 and his difficult relationship with some of the collective's members is evident from his later 12 June 2017 blog entry:

The Lead Sheds Poster Workshop at Sydney University had long suffered my independent label - Toby Zoates - as a fringe-dweller to their “Dirtworks Collective.” They had cooperatively shown me how to make perfect, beautiful hand-printed posters using photographic stencils on silk-screens, and they encouraged my individual, original designs and tolerated my passionate social critiques and political causes, much of which they too supported. I paid for all my materials, cleaned up after myself, and helped them when they needed labor to put their own posters up on the drying racks. I swear, I would always be heartfelt grateful for their assistance.

Long before my “Darling it Hurtz!” poster, in 1978 I’d noticed cans of fluoro paints sitting idle in a dusty corner and asked who were using them, and was told, “Nobody, they are a new wave techno paint, ‘60s style fluorescent glow paint. We're not interested!” I recalled the fluorescent murals I’d seen in a hippie cafe in Bangalore, India, in 1973 - Alice in Wonderland in glowing colors against a black field, black-lights illuminating them into psychedelic mind-warps - and I’d been flabbergasted at how brilliantly the style could communicate visions. I asked the workshop if I could use the unused cans of fluoros and, printing on waste computer print-out paper, I created my first fluoro poster, “The Anti-Authoritarian Dance” at Balmain Town Hall, with bands like White Trash and A.W.O.L. playing, and I must say the night was a rocking, roaring success.

Toby states elsewhere that he eventually produced 17 posters at the Tin Sheds over a period of seven years, though the true figure is closer to 21 over a decade. The following is a listing of Toby's Tin Sheds works.

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References

Allam, Lorena, The Hothouse: art and politics at the Tin Sheds (audio), Hindsight, ABC Radio National, 24 June 2007. Duration: 55 minutes. Available URL: https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2008/01/hht_20080106.mp3.

Kenyon, Therese, Under a hot tin roof: art, passion and politics at the Tin Sheds, State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1995.

Mackinolty, Chips, The Tin Sheds : Sydney, in Merewether, Charles and Stephen, Anne (editors), The Great Divide, Melbourne, 1977, 131-139.

Organ, Michael, The oo oo ah ah oo ah ah dance poster 1979 [blog], 8 June 2019. Available URL: https://ooahdance.blogspot.com/.

Yuill, Katie, Girls at the Tin Sheds: Sydney Feminist Posters 1975-90, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, March 2015, 72p.

Zoates, Toby, Toby the Punk Poofy Cat [blog], 2006+. Available URL: http://tobyzoates.blogspot.com/.

-----, Vagabond Freak - Deadbeat Realism in the Queer Underworld, Amazon ebook, 2017, 437p. Available URL: https://www.amazon.com.au/Vagabond-Freak-Book-Lives-Poofy-ebook/dp/B07287ST5Q.

-----, Toby Zoates Hard Art, Facebook, 2020. Available URL: https://www.facebook.com/TeaZerart/.;

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Toby Zoates art Part 1 1977-1986 | Part 2 - 1987-2019 | Part 3 - 2020+ | Tin Sheds |

Michael Organ, Australia

Last updated: 24 March 2020