Kophie a.k.a Meep One is such a prominent part of the Ōtautahi and wider Aotearoa scene that it is hard to believe she has not staged a solo exhibition of work – until now! Trials is the artist’s first foray into a solo gallery exhibition, fittingly staged during the 2024 Christchurch Hip Hop and hosted by Fibre Gallery, key connections for Meep, whose work is rooted in the influence of graffiti and hip hop culture and her proud bi-cultural Dutch and Samoan heritage. While gaining widespread attention for her public mural work, Meep is well-versed in studio work, from painting to design and even fashion and jewellery. Trials will focus on her imaginative creative output without the restrictions of public commission conditions. A fiercely principled individual, Meep’s art is always imbued with meanings and discourses drawn from her experiences and observations, even when it appears more surreal than topical. We sat down with Kophie to chat about Trials, the process of bringing it all together, hip hop culture, subversive influences, and a number of other topics…
Your upcoming exhibition, Trials, will be staged at Fibre Gallery in October – I was surprised that this will be your first solo exhibition, for someone with your body of work and profile, it’s been a long time coming…
Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do it, I just haven’t really had the guts! It’s been terrifying because I really don’t like being the centre of attention or anything like that. But art is an important part of my life, and it has been ever since I was born really, so I’m happy to finally do it. I’ve wanted to do a show with a big research project behind it for ages, but it’s just too much and it’s hard to get funding for that scale, so for this show I’m focussed on painting stuff that I want to paint in the moment, experimenting and just showing it really…
There is so much work that goes into organising a show, the logistics of funding it and organising a venue, the promotion and all those things, but an exhibition also needs to have something to say, and it takes time to develop a body of work out of formative ideas. The fact that this has taken a while to manifest, does that mean you feel more confident in terms of what you’re saying?
Yeah, and I feel like once I get my first show out of the way, then I won’t feel so stressed about doing it again. In the past I have put too much pressure on myself to make it perfect, but I have just let that go and just made art.
Trials is taking place as part of the 2024 Christchurch Hip Hop Summit. The influence of hip hop has always been a strong element of your work, how much did street culture, graffiti and hip hop inspire this exhibition?
One of my first introductions to graffiti was seeing the wall at Waltham Park from the first Hip Hop Summit in Christchurch, and the guys from the Summit team have always been supportive of me. I was supposed to do one for last year’s Summit, but I wasn’t able to secure funding, so they’re kind of making me do it this year! Hip hop and graffiti are a massive part of my inspiration, and so is street culture in general, like skateboarding. I wasn’t good at skateboarding, but I was around the culture. Growing up in Wanaka, it’s very outdoorsy, so things like snowboarding were also an influence. Then we moved to Christchurch and seeing all the graffiti when I was a teenager was a big part of my growing up. Once I was transfixed with graffiti and art, apart from non-stop drawing, I would always either bunk or walk after school to the South Library and pour over all the graffiti, art and skateboarding books they had there at the time. When I was at school, I would just sit in class and basically draw on myself all day. A lot of the stuff in Trials is inspired by that feeling I had when I was younger and seeing graffiti for the first time and how the world was back then without social media. I think there is a nostalgia for that time, most days I just want to throw it all out the window and just play in the street like I did when I was a kid. It just seems like the world now is completely different…
I assume the show’s title refers to the trials and tribulations that you’ve been through, but it also suggests the concept of criminality that is associated with graffiti, the challenge of transitioning graffiti into a career in the arts, and perhaps the trials of modern-day life, especially the impact of technology and social media. Was the title intentionally so wide-reaching in its suggestions?
Yeah definitely, when I was trying to think of a name, I wanted something that had multiple meanings. The name evokes the trials I have been through to get to where I am now. I guess I had a hard upbringing, but despite dropping out of school, I was able to get an education and then to do what I do now, I’m very grateful of how far I’ve come and how I’ve gotten through all that. Trials also reflects the fact that I wanted to do a lot of experimentation in this body of work. I’ve had so many ideas for so long and I just haven’t had time or the ability to take time from work and focus on painting. It takes a lot of time and money, which is proving to be difficult even right now. I start at 9am and then finish at 9pm and I’m still working on the same painting…
Obviously, there are a lot of very personal aspects embedded in the show, but something I admire in your work is that when you are painting real people, including your self-portraits, you imbue your subjects with a symbolic quality, a feeling of being an archetype rather than an explicitly specific person…
I like to create the whole character. I don’t like doing realism, it’s not something that I really enjoy. It’s just a skill rather than being able to use creativity and imagination. So, for this show there is a lot more of my cartoony stuff, abstracted and surrealist stuff, subversive stuff. There are a lot of hidden messages. I find straight ahead realism quite boring because you are just painting what’s there. I want to create characters from scratch and give them back stories that reflect how I was feeling in that moment or something that inspired me. I doodle all the time, so I’ve taken a lot of stuff that I have drawn and remember how I was feeling and then I try to turn them into better works…
What does the process look like? How do you go about taking an initial drawing that captures an idea and turning it into a more polished painting?
Working on an iPad makes it a lot easier because I just take a photo of a random sketch and refine it. It’s easier to play with colours and stuff before I paint it. But other times, I just start drawing on a piece of wood or canvas and then I just paint it. So, some of them have a refined sketch, some of them don’t. I’m mostly playing with oil and acrylics on ply, which is my favourite surface. I’m largely using recycled ply that I’ve cut into shapes, it’s reminiscent of some of my paste-ups in the past, big cut out figures, but they’re on ply and nicely painted. There are probably only going to be two real portraits, one inspired by me, because it’s hard to get a reference photo of someone else and I don’t want to use AI, and one of Callum [Kophie’s partner, who is currently finishing a music production degree in Australia] because I miss him! But in both cases, they’re not just portraits, they’re abstracted and stylised, with stories behind them.
You mentioned the presence of subversive elements in your work. How important is working in the studio for the expression of subversion when you are increasingly creating commissioned public works where creative freedom is lessened? Does that become part of that nostalgic element that you’re looking for as well?
Yeah, one hundred per cent. I feel like a lot of my big murals are be watered down a lot because of the client relationship, so this show does take me back to my roots. I’ve always been outspoken and political. I care about issues, so that’s always been a central part of my work. In my first year of study, we had to draw a portrait of a friend. He told me he worked in the meat works, so I drew him like Hannibal Lecter as a joke, and I made this big melting-globe-world-monster thing, and a fish made of scrap materials symbolizing a radioactive fish after the Fukushima disaster, which had just occurred. I guess it comes from the influence of satire, political art, like Obey, and the likes of Adbusters. Skate graphics as well, they have a history of being subversive and they definitely influenced me. That stuff’s always been cool to me. I played a lot of video games growing up and they always had funny subversive stuff, like in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, there was a Sasquatch character…
I like that with games now, where you see custom builds and skins, so you’ll have these relatively normal worlds, and then, all of a sudden, they’re populated by giant bananas. The more ridiculous something is, the more it reveals the underlying absurdity of what we perceive as normal…
I like the balance of silly but serious at the same time, it makes you think. All my works are very topical in one way or another, some are just more obvious than others. I feel like a big thing in my work is the impending doom of climate change and how we are all heading towards a fiery death, but no one seems to care. It’s just like head in the sand stuff…
It’s that whole This Is Fine meme, the dog sitting in a flaming room…
That’s exactly the aesthetic, that whole ‘I’m fine’ thing…
We have discussed some of the themes and subject, but is this body of work a progression in terms of visual style?
I feel like it’s me being true to my original style. If you look at my old workbooks, I drew the same sort of stuff but just way worse, so it is an evolution of that. I haven’t really been able to paint big versions of my sketches. I do a little bit in my graffiti when I have enough paint, but not as much as I would like.
It feels like a balancing act of how to express yourself in different spaces…
I guess it comes back to the duality of doing illegal stuff while also trying to go to meetings and be professional. I always feel so fake in a way. But I look at businesspeople who are doing horrendous shit and they don’t bat an eyelid. I’m a genuine person that sticks to their guns, so I just feel really weird about living a double life. I don’t know how to act half the time…
How do you think the idea of a more genuine expression relates to the broader context of hip hop? At its heart, hip hop is very much a DIY culture, but it also has been through so many incarnations; you had the earlier stages of hip hop, street parties and making something from little or nothing, then you had the ‘get cash’ and bling kind of attitude of the nineties onwards, that hustle ethos, and now hip hop has evolved into something different again as it is more commercial today. What hip hop ethos do you identify with most strongly?
I guess hip hop has become very commercialised nowadays and I never want to be a commercial sort of artist. I just want to be someone who makes art about things that are happening in the present moment. I like a lot of underground music.With the Full Steam Ahead crew, we wanted to try and incorporate all the hip hop elements. Even though we mainly do graffiti and rap at the moment, we do have B-Boys in the crew. I love the origins of hip hop. Street wear, clothing and fashion is also a big part of my inspiration. When I was a kid, a lot of the time I would just draw the different outfits that I dreamed of having because I had to wear second hand clothes. It wasn’t cool to wear second hand clothes then! I would draw all sorts of cool outfits. I’d draw girls and then cut them out and make them different outfits like paper dolls. I thought I was going to be a fashion designer! Drawing my characters with cool clothes and accessories is a central part of my art, I guess. The t-shirt as an important platform for messages is another idea I really like. When I was painting recently, I was thinking about all the clothes I had when I was a teenager and stuff, I had this cool t-shirt that said like ‘Big Brother is Watching’ from the 2000s, why did I get rid of it! I want to paint it now, just thinking about that!
That captures the DIY element of hip hop for me, it was created by young people who didn’t have access to things so they made use of what they could, whether it was street corners or subway trains…
That’s definitely a central part of my work and my whole life really. I’ve always made stuff that I didn’t have. I’d make clothes for my dolls from scratch or like second hand fabrics. I just did it out of necessity really. Even now, like I built a fence at home when we needed one. I make do with what I have, I upcycle things, I learn to make and fix what I can. I have always been a DIY type. I’d cut out posters from free magazines when I was a kid, take the posters and cut them up and collage them and poster my room with them. I don’t know, it’s always been like that. I made the hat I’m wearing because I was playing the video game Harry Potter Legacy, and I liked the hat one of the characters was wearing. I was like, I need it, so I made it. My art has always been from second hand stuff or acquired items. Right now, I’m using recycled ply because I had it. It comes down to my ethos of not buying new things for the good of sustainability. Everything nowadays is so crappily made anyway.
The clothing your subjects wear is important, whether a t-shirt with a message or your works that explore Pasifika identity and traditional clothing, these are a reflection of your background and the way fashion has always been so important to hip hop, punk, any kind of street culture…
Yeah, I made the weirdest outfits when I was a teenager. I had a big emo phase and a Boy George phase, like an eighties phase, a gangster phase, haha. I think fashion plays a big part in personal expression, so it is important in my artwork. Especially drawing things that I couldn’t get or creating my own fashion designs…
I want to see some photos of Boy George era Kophie! You mentioned your crew Full Steam Ahead, but of course you are now also a member of TMD [The Most Dedicated]. How big an impact has that had on your work, knowing you are part of a globally celebrated creative collective? Does that bring pressure, or does it just reinforce your self-belief?
I mean, I think about it every single day because it blows my mind that I’m in TMD! I’m so inspired by everyone in the crew. When I was younger, I would use my friend’s computer, because I didn’t have one at home, just to look at pictures of TMD productions and stuff, so it blows my mind really. It did give me the push in confidence to have my own exhibition, because I wanted to in the past, but I was worried that no one would really come or turn up, but I have gotten to the point now that I don’t really care anymore. I am also not making art to for the intention of anyone buying or anything like that, I’m making it because it’s stuff that I’ve always wanted to make and it’s a reflection of myself. Although it is all for sale!
That’s really important I think, because it is quite rare. For a lot of people an exhibition is a way to sell work, to make money, so to have an exhibition where you can be more honest in terms of what you want to say and you can make work that’s important to you, it must make the whole process more satisfying on a personal level…
Yeah, as I mentioned, I wanted to do a whole research aspect and have detailed stories behind each work, but I didn’t have the time and funds to do all that. But it feels more freeing to just do what I feel like doing in the moment and do whatever is topical or influenced by whatever podcast I’m listening to, or if I’m angry or sad or happy, then make something based around that. I feel like it takes the pressure off, and I feel like it gives it more authenticity…
Do you have a defined idea of how the whole show will look?
Sort of, but not really. I’m not sure if they will all really match or anything, it’s just like my brain spilling onto a painting. But I have four paintings so far, and it’s quite a big space so I’ll see what happens. It was quite a short turn around, they asked me a couple of months ago, so I guess I’ve had four months to get it all ready, which sounds like a long time, but it’s not really, especially when you’re trying to do a hundred other things. Paintings take so much longer than anything else. But yeah, I’ll see what I can do!
Who do you want to thank?
Red and Tommy from the Hip Hop Summit and YCD [Youth & Cultural Development], Nina from Fibre Gallery for making me do it, Selina and the FSA and TMD crews, and of course, Callum!
What do people need to know about Trials?
The show will open on the 4th of October at Fibre Gallery on Cashel Street, where my mural Navigation is on the side of the building. I think it opens at 6pm. We have DJ INFARED playing. I might bring some Speights…
I hope you arrive in your best Boy George outfit!
I may or may not show up!
Trials opens 6pm, Friday October 4th at Fibre Gallery, 285 Cashel Street – Follow Kophie on social media for more details…
