culture

Although Kat Stewart is well known for playing dark, in-your-face characters, her life experience has led her to a greater appreciation of hope and contentment. Her latest stage role is in Melbourne Theatre Company’s Heisenberg. “The idea I really love is that we spend all this energy trying to control our lives and take comfort in that … but we have very, very, very little control and what this play confronts you with is: What if that is not a bad thing?”

Zindzi Okenyo is asserting herself through her art – on stage, on screen and in the recording studio. Here, the singer-songwriter and actor talks about growing up in different parts of Australia, travelling to her father’s birth country, and being comfortable in her own skin. “The older that I’ve gotten, the more it seems to me the way to be better is to know yourself as much as possible and then relax into it.”

During his illustrious career, Hugo Weaving has consistently returned to the STC stage, where he currently stars in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The actor discusses his upbringing, his concerns about the local film industry, and sharing the stage with his son. “I thought Harry would be really good in the role. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want any sense of nepotism. I just don’t think that’s right.”

At the age of 79, Herbie Hancock has had a long and fruitful career, but the legendary jazz pianist remains forward-thinking. “There’s so much division happening globally and I actually believe that this is one of the final stages we need to solve, and fix, and learn from in order to be able to tackle climate change. That’s either going to do us in or we’re going to fix it.”

On her magical new album, Designer, Aldous Harding’s songs remain intensely personal. But she wants her listeners to make their own meaning of her music. “I can never listen to my work the way other people can, and if that’s what it makes them think of – if that’s what it draws up for them – then who am I to say that it’s not? Because I have no idea what it’s like to listen to my work. It doesn’t affect me in a positive or a negative way.”

As Sydney-born, Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti prepares to show her three-channel video work Assembly in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, she talks about emotional responses, music as a salve and the vital need for connection. “Dissonance is a word that was really important to this work. Basically, the work is using music as a metaphor. It travels through dissonance, through harmony, through polyphony, through cacophony.”

Artist Janet Laurence explores the relationship between the metaphysical and the physical by giving voice to our fraught but soul-deep relationship with the world in which we live. “My first review read, ‘Janet Laurence deals with nature and the dark side of life and this is not where a woman should be.’ ” She dissolves into peals of laughter. “It was a female writer!”

As Rosslynd Piggott prepares for I Sense You But I Cannot See You – the second retrospective of her career at the National Gallery of Victoria – she reflects on her childhood in Frankston, her ambition as a young artist and her life’s work. “I did a year of teaching in 1981 in the remote Victorian country at Werrimull. I’d just come out of post-punk Melbourne, thrust up there in the middle of nowhere. I was never going to do three years up there. After that, I just ran away, basically, to St Kilda, doing dishwashing and waitressing. I knew I wanted to be an artist.”

In his intricate debut novel, Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg entwines the lives of an 18th-century transgender thief and the academic who becomes obsessed with his story. In doing so, Rosenberg aims to counteract the historical erasure – and the continuing persecution – of trans people. “There are many things missing from archives but sometimes even what is there can obscure more than it reveals.”