The Mutual Admiration Society
Stephen Templer. Hataitai, 2025.
I often like to think that I’d find greatest happiness and creative fulfilment if I was located somewhere a little bit remote, away from the distractions of our chaotic urban rhythm. I’d love to sell up, and move to the pastoral outskirts of Whanganui or Dunedin, to a place with space and quiet (and, in my fantasy, a big multipurpose studio / darkroom and workshop I could isolate myself in to make artwork that changes the world). But my life isn’t going conform to that utopia any time soon, and I quite possibly wouldn’t even enjoy it if it happened. In reality, I need the community of other creatives around me to drive me to do better things. Without other artists, designers, musicians, writers and people who think about creativity, I might dry up, or begin to rinse and repeat whatever I feel was most recently successful.
The photograph above was made during a portrait session with the League of Live Illustrators - a collective of extraordinarily generative and gifted artists, who work individually in their own businesses, creating illustrated artworks for books and advertising and murals and all kinds of things, but who also banded together to offer a service of dynamic ‘live’ illustration for organisations who need to capture ideas in a visual way. The Live Illustrators are uber talented, and very busy as a result, but they’re also inspirational in other ways. In my messaging with them before our photoshoot, I learned about the way they work together to translate strategies and processes through drawing, to convey those concepts back to the organisation they’re engaged with, and communicate it with the wider world. They’re often working with kaupapa Māori, and if you look at their mahi, you’ll see clearly articulated values that are echoed in the projects they take on. Our day together was full of colour and energy, and gentle integrity. What’s more, they all made me feel like an absolute queen, then, and since, with their response to my representations of them.
Stephen Templer, pictured above, is one of the team, and he’s actually renowned for the myriad clever things he does. As an ex-Wellingtonian, he’s responsible for much of the creative identity Pōneke is known for, and now he plys his trade further north in Tāmaki Makaurau, and I guess wherever else his work takes him. Steve illustrates, animates, performs, and dreams up stories and characters, including his alter ego storyteller Darcy Lamington. His illustrations are absolutely beautiful and joyful, and above all, whimsical. I want to step inside his imaginary world, where the prosaic has no purchase. When he showed up, moustachioed and suave in his naval jacket, and took his place on the mustard coloured velvet settee, I knew there was a special kind of creativity at work. If you’re interested to see some of the things he does, you can visit his instagram presence here: @the_real_steveyt and here: @darcylamington.
People like Steve and the others in LoLI (that’s you, Megan, Yasmine, Beka and Kelly), are one of the reasons I keep wanting to do what I do. They’re a little bit irreverent. Ok, sometimes a lot. And they take risks. Left by myself, I tend to play it very safe, and I fall back on my early education for inspiration. History of Art, of the renaissance-y kind, might have been avant-garde in its day, but it doesn’t cut it for bringing my thoughts to the table now. I want the impetus of real live creators to help me properly grow. Show me the audacious and the new. Some artists work well as hermits, removing connection with normality so that they can bury themselves in a pure kind of making. That’s the Van Gogh cut-your-ear-off kind of artist life that wouldn’t be useful for my family, or actually for my own mental health. Instead, if I’m honest, I’m really pretty happy when my work lets me encounter the brilliance of other people, and dwell for a time in their particular passions.
Thank you Steve, for making a vivid imagination a viable choice. I am really really glad I got to photograph you.