Happy Meals and Scooter Skids exhibition with Andy Quilty at FORM Gallery and Midland Junction Arts Centre

Being told by a fellow Curtin University student that “nobody likes you because you’re a bogan” is a moment that has stayed with Rockingham-raised artist Andy Quilty long after graduation. “It really cut me a lot,” 43-year-old Quilty recounts. “I was kind of the only kid like me from the outer suburbs and it made me feel like I didn’t fit in. I’d seen all kinds of wild s… growing up, and was pretty fearless, but that instilled fear.” His parents had built their Rockingham family home in 1979 when the location was still considered to be the ends of the Earth in Perth, with no freeway connection but, according to Quilty, the best surf around. A love for drawing was encouraged by his mum, fostered by a subscription to MAD magazine for each birthday during his teen years. “That’s basically how I learnt to draw,” Quilty says, who has lectured in fine arts at the University of Western Australia for more than a decade. “Art was my favourite subject. I was a very naughty boy at school, but that was the one subject where I behaved, where I was all in, where I really worked my guts out and was super keen. “It used to be that I was just obsessed with drawing and painting, and I felt ‘whatever idea I have, how can I make that into a drawing or a painting?’. Whereas these days, it’s much more conceptually driven. So the idea kind of comes first, and then I think about the most appropriate or the best way to communicate that idea, whether it’s a photograph, doing a burnout on a block of concrete, or making a big drawing or a series of drawings.” After graduating, Quilty worked at a surfboard factory — doing maintenance, repairs and adding artwork to the surfboards — before deciding to take “a serious crack at being an artist” and pursuing a multidisciplinary practice. He also facilitates creative development workshops in schools, Aboriginal art centres, community organisations, non-profits and prisons, while his masters in fine arts academic research explores arts in outer suburbia, the oft-forgotten space between regional and central metro areas. “My project research was all related to under-recognised forms of art-making in outer suburbia,” the Warnbro resident says. “One example being burnouts. I use the analogy that when I was young, I used to see all the car burnouts on the streets, and then I used to try to replicate them on my BMX. I’d ride really fast and do a big snaky skid in the same configuration that I saw the burnouts doing. I later realised that those skids wasn’t about trying to hoon or anything, it was about trying to make a drawing, leave a mark behind. “It’s a very deliberate kind of mark-making. It’s just one example of these kind of actions, that maybe resist gentrification. You might be able to drive up the property prices, but you can’t get rid of our burnouts. “That led into research around lack of opportunities for kids growing up in outer suburbia, and particularly kids from public schools ... There are public schools where if you want to do art to set yourself up for university, it’s just not even an option, it’s not available to you.” Happy Meals and Scooter Skids is a major exhibition at FORM Gallery in Claremont, alongside a satellite exhibition at Midland Junction Arts Centre, both curated by Andrew Nicholls and still on display after inclusion in the Perth Festival 2025 program. With only a few of Quilty’s artworks at each exhibition space, the rest of Happy Meals and Scooter Skids showcases monochromatic pieces by students from Youth Futures Community School Midland, Armadale Senior High School and Warnbro Community High School, who participated in six two-hour workshops he facilitated at each school in 2024. “I was teaching them drawing and print-making techniques, and different tools and processes, and I just let them go nuts to make whatever they wanted to make,” he explains. “I tried to take a very hands-off approach. There were just a few creative decisions I made, like keeping the works black and white, so they didn’t have to try to jazz it up with colour and could really focus on the marks they were making. It also meant it was more cohesive because I wanted it to be a slick exhibition. “I wanted the outcome to be really strong, to kind of demonstrate that, ‘hey, when you give these young people in these places this opportunity, they’ve got a lot of really big life experience and stuff to talk about that I think a lot of kids in the western suburbs don’t have’. “I think there’s a lot of guts in the stories these kids have to tell, and I think it really shows in the exhibition. I call it drawing from your guts rather than from your head, and I think that’s really what these kids do. It’s a really diverse body of work.” Happy Meals and Scooter Skids is at FORM Gallery, Claremont until May 24 and Midland Junction Arts Centre until April 27, before it tours to Kim Fletcher Gallery, Armadale, mid-year and Rockingham Arts Centre in November. Quilty is facilitating an all-ages workshop at FORM Gallery on May 3, bookings at humanitix.com/au.