I’m in Fairfield on my lunch break, on my way to Nouha’s Bakery (formally A1 Bakery), to get my usual order, a falafel fold-over with chilli. I’ve been eating these fold-overs for nearly 15 years now, and I always enjoy them. This has been my standard order here since I was a young whipper snapper who moved to Northcote with hopes and dreams.

As I walk through the suburban streets, I find myself thinking about the publication Speech Patterns: Nadia Hernández & Jon Campbell. It accompanied their two-person exhibition at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2022, which explored their shared preoccupations with class, identity and value systems, and it’s a beautiful addition to the works that were shown. I like the way they’ve used paper of different thickness and the way it feels as you turn the pages—there’s matte, then gloss, pages of monochromatic colour, interspersed with documentation of Campbell’s and Hernandez’ colourful and poetic paintings, prints and installations. And just like my extra chilli it serves up a couple of short essays to make it complete.

One of the essays is by artist and writer, Lisa Radford, who taught me during my time at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). She’s an artist who writes and thinks about writing as painting, and vice versa. Radford’s essay on Nadia Hernández is a conversation with the artist that traces Hernández’s Venezuelan background via the political and personal, reflected in the publication’s idiosyncratic formatting, repetition of phrases and circling around of ideas. It’s a pattern of speech, that in a growing friendship, sometimes finishes the other’s sentences, punctuated by ‘WOW!’ and ‘YEAH!’

Artist and writer Diego Ramírez’ ‘para-fiction’ focuses on a singular work of Jon Campbell’s, his 2015 print What Are You Fuckin Lookin At. It cracked me up so much I laughed out loud. It made me more alert to the street signs, shop windows, and snippets of conversation that were suddenly in front of me. I watched a couple of troubled parents step out of a doctor’s surgery give their two young children a five dollar note because they were crying from receiving painful injections. It even made me teary. I wondered what all these fragments and the tiny things we notice might amount to–a sum of parts that becomes something more revealing?

But now I find myself singing the Tom Waits song Goin Out West and I’m reflecting on the two Melbourne based artists Campbell and Hernández showing their work in Western Australia. Despite the geographical distance, the artists give visible slices of their daily lives, sharing the things they notice in their respective worlds. The accompanying publication is an artwork and it might even brighten up your day too.

Speech Patterns: Nadia Hernandez & Jon Campbell is edited by Kay Campbell with contributions from Robert Cook, Lisa Radford and Diego Ramírez and published by The Art Gallery of Western Australia.

You can purchase a copy at the Art Guide Bookstore.