You tend to remember a James Dodd exhibition: all fluoro sunsets and endearingly indecent illicit etchings, skulls and seagulls, silhouetted palms and paddy wagons, barramundi and bus shelters. While the rest of us are off collecting stamps and Barbie dolls, Dodd makes his way around Australia collecting regional graffiti (by way of photograph), which he then re-assembles in his works, toying with those tricky ol’ post-modern notions of ownership and distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Woo-wee!

So what sort of stuff have you been working on lately? Still plugging away at your Darwin street-art inspired stuff?
That’s right. Generally speaking, I’m still using graffiti and found text – finding graffiti which is not New York-based stuff, so not tags. Just finding random things that people write, and compiling them into larger compositions. So I’m working a lot with the Darwin material, mixed with Darwin scenery. Trying to make images that might, somehow, via the text, capture a sort of psyche or common sort of subconscious. And then I have a show coming up in Melbourne, so I’ve been applying the same sort of idea to Melbourne material.

We haven’t seen any of that stuff yet?
Not yet, no. You saw my Format Festival show, yeah?

Yeah. Was that for your Masters at UniSA, your final assessment ‘thing’? [Note: I have absolutely no idea how Masters degrees work].
Yeah. So that was a selection of stuff I’ve made of the last couple of years. I was really happy to get that space.

Does the Darwin street art style particularly appeal to you?
It’s really unique. My thing has been looking at graffiti – it’s what I really look at and notice when I go places. And when I went to Darwin, I was immediately struck by how unique it is. It seems to me to have developed – in its isolation – its own path. It hasn’t been so directly influenced by the New York movement. The whole New York tag movement, as I see it, is quite restrictive. The stuff in Darwin’s great.

How’s Darwin street art different from the street art in, say, Adelaide?
One difference is the way that all the young indigenous kids write all their initials. So while we may have two initials, first name and surname, they’ve usually got four or five. They might have their common English name, plus an indigenous name, plus a couple of family names, so you see these big lists of all these initials. And the way they’re written is quite nice, the style they use. Usually when you scratch into things, you have to use a lot of straight lines. And even when the tags are written in pen, they still use that scratching style, which I think is really nice. Then there are all these sorts of abbreviations and codes which are really unique.

So when you go to Darwin, are you just an observer? Do you get in touch with any of the prominent street artists there?
Usually I don’t have any contact with the people immediately, and generally speaking the stuff I’m looking at is largely anonymous. That said, with the Darwin material, there’s one paper that’s been written that’s really interesting. It’s not so much about graffiti, but about gang culture around the Wadeye and Port Keats region. So some of that comes through. This last week was my third visit up there, and each time you visit you get closer to those who are actually responsible for it.

So your works are replications of the actual tags? You don’t come up with your own ideas for witty slogans to slap onto your works – it’s all faithful to what you actually come across ‘in the field’?
I digitally alter the photos I take of the tags to extract the text. Just using Photoshop. Then, when I’m creating a work, there’s maybe fifty or sixty layers – with each tag its own layer – which
I project onto the canvas.

So I guess this takes you into the shady area of ‘high art vs low art’?
I’m interested in doing what I’m doing right now because it isn’t designed. My work, I feel, fits into a little gray zone, and I don’t know the answer. It’s through making it and presenting it and having conversations with people, that I try to find out how people think. There’s a piece I’ve made which is in Darwin, which is a full-scale model of a bus-stop and on it there’s a piece of text which says “So-and-so is a disease carrier” and when it was shown in Brisbane, somebody came in who knew this person [‘So-and-so’] and made an official complaint. And that’s fine, that’s the kind of thing I’m trying to find out! There’s so much swearing in there [in my work] and so much commonly offensive language that people don’t seem to give a shit about really, it’s just those personal things that people tend to see as offensive. And in the latest showing [of the bus-stop work], I’ve actually painted over that person’s name. Hopefully I can have more encounters like that! It’s really nice to see people who meet people who are really familiar with the material.

Did you come into practicing art from a ‘high art’ foundation - taking art classes at high school, and then studying visual arts at uni and so on - or were you a street artist to begin with?
People love that myth: ‘Oh, you’re a street artist who’s become a gallery artist’, but that’s not my situation. I’ve always been an artist, it just happens that I’ve spent a lot of time making street art, and I think most artists’ paths sort of meander a bit. I’d always been into graffiti as a kid, but it’s only as an adult that I’ve become active in the street art scene, and I haven’t really been active for the last four of five years. I lived in Melbourne for about seven years - from 2000 to 2007 - and that was a time when the whole stencil movement was beginning, and I found myself in the middle of that. It was great – like they say, it really was ‘the good old days’.

That must have been exciting. Now the ‘stencil movement’ is a bit old-hat, but to have been there at the beginning…
There are certain reasons why stencil art took off in Melbourne: the city is really compact and it has those laneways where you can get away with doing that sort of thing and lots of leftist-oriented young people around. And, just by chance, the Melbourne councils didn’t really have a problem with it for a long time - they didn’t buff it - which helped the culture grow and sustain itself. And what happened at the end was that people started putting things in galleries, and that shifted the energy. And I was involved with that, but in hindsight, it would have been better without that, I think. Something that I always say is that ‘street art’ is street art when it’s in the street, whereas if it’s in a gallery, it’s gallery art. People who just try to replicate exactly what they do in the street in a gallery, their work just doesn’t have the excitement or energy it has on the street.

Are you creating work in that ‘in-between zone’, or are you self-consciously creating ‘gallery art’?
Yeah, I’m consciously trying to make gallery art.

Have many of the stencil artists you knew in Melbourne made the transition to exhibiting in galleries?
A lot of people who became active around the time of the stencil-art movement have stuck it out and are having quite a bit of success as far as gallery art goes. They’re starting to have more shows... and make an income from their art, which is great. On the street, there’s been a lot more freestyle, aerosol stuff which began to come out around the end of the stencil movement. Lots of people are doing really interesting stuff.

Why’d you decide to come to Adelaide? Not that Adelaide isn’t a great place to live, but… y’know…
I like Adelaide - I like living here! And I felt as though I’d had my time in Melbourne, to a certain degree. Melbourne is great, I love it, but there’s so much on it’s sometimes hard to focus on your own shit. I need to be in a place where there’s less potential for distractions. Yeah, I think I’ll stick around in Adelaide.

And the rather generic, but super important question: whose work are you influenced by?
Some of the biggest influences on me are sixties psychedelic rock posters and hand-made screen-printed posters out of the States from the eighties and nineties. So people like Frank Kozik, Derek Hess, and Robert Williams. And people like Barry McGee of course. Or anyone really from the whole ‘Beautiful Losers’ group [a collective of artists including McGee and Steve Powers whose DIY street art style became renowned in New York art circles in the ‘90s].

I’m a writer, and incredibly impractical, so I know bugger-all about making art. How do you do it?
I have a few different things that I make so I don’t always use the same technique. With the big black works – the big walls – I put the colour down first, and then paint the black over the top. Some of the other works that have the sort of scratch marks on them are made using latex - so I put a colour down first, then latex, then paint everything over the top, and then the latex scratches. It gives a good imitation of scratching.

What keeps you passionate about your art?
I think that about ninety percent of the people who are involved in street art are not necessarily interested in art history – which is okay, that’s not a problem, but I do have a strong interest in art history, and it’s harder to explore that on the street. At the moment I’m passionate about trying to make things that take a long time to create - with really dense information and references. And the reason I look at the material I do [Darwin street art] is that I find graffiti which is outside that [New York] tradition entertaining and exciting, because there are no rules and you can’t predict the way it’s going to be. There’s no straight answer when you try and consider what the person’s motivations are in creating street art, whereas when you see a tag [in the New York tradition] you know why someone did it. With the Darwin graffiti, there’s a lot more mystery to it.

See more of James work here