SPOT OF ECLECTIQUE
AT HOME Camille Antoine fills her Federation West Hobart home with unusual treasures found in op-shops
WORDS DALE CAMPISI PHOTOGRAPHY SAM ROSEWARNE
Cliche-busting French-born artist Camille Antoine lives in the style and safety of West Hobart, but life has not always been so comfortable
C amille Antoine grew up in the French port city of Marseille.
“France is not all beautiful little villages with accordion music playing in the background,” she says.
“Marseille has lots of influences from Italy, Spain and Africa, and it’s a port for weapons and drug trafficking. There was an unofficial curfew at 5.30pm. It was very unsafe.”
Cami, 28, left home at 15 when she won a scholarship to an international school also in the south of France.
“One day the teacher showed us a VHS of Australia, showing the Whitsunday Islands, and I was thinking, ‘I have to go there’.”
By 18, she had saved enough money for a ticket to Cairns. “But I hated Cairns,” she says. “I felt like I had arrived in the middle of the apartheid. It was really shocking to me that indigenous people were treated differently.”
Arriving in Tasmania in early 2008 Cami was struck by how pristine it seemed.
“But I was looking pretty dishevelled,” she says. “On my first day, a woman approached me in the mall asking if I was OK and gave me the numbers for Lifeline and Colony 47. I knew then that I could make a home here.”
On a trip to Bruny Island she encountered more Tassie hospitality when a local woman gave her a personal tour of the island as well as a free pass for a Pennicott boat cruise.
“It was a very stormy day, but I was on the bow anyway, spotting seals and albatrosses and falling in love with the place,” Cami says.
She stayed three years on Bruny, where she also gave birth to her daughter, Charlie, now aged six. Eventually she found Bruny a bit isolated and moved to Hobart.
The shady veranda of her three-bedroom Federation-era West Hobart home is now a favourite place to hang out.
“I could spend hours here,” Cami says. “In fact, I do. It’s so great for people watching.” On cue, a neighbour stops by to say g’day. Inside, a central hallway opens to bedrooms and a lounge room. A dark spot is illuminated by an old miner’s sieve reborn with white fairy lights. Cami has an eye for the unusual, which can be seen both in what she collects as well her own watercolours, a medium she has been working in since she moved to Hobart.
“Previously, I have always used black pen,” she says. “Then my friend Adam gave me a palette of watercolours and encouraged me to experiment.”
The lounge is her favourite room, decked out like a salon with art and artefacts and a touch of chinoiserie. Only one of her ethereal watercolours is pinned to the wall.
“I don’t like putting my own stuff up,” she says. A Sam Field landscape dominates the mantelpiece, but it is a naked muppet by Josh Pringle that steals the scene.
“He does the Keep Tassie Wild stickers,” Cami explains.
“Actually, it’s the first piece of art I ever bought. It reminds me of Quasimodo. I was lucky it was affordable because I love it so much.”
She is a keen bargain hunter. “I don’t have much money, so I shop at op-shops and garage sales,” she says, pointing to her wellworn brown leather couch, which she has draped with deer skins.
Cami describes last year’s Museum of Everything exhibition at Mona as one of the best she has ever seen, and is herself a collector of strange art “for the effort someone has put into creating it”.
A collection of miniature houses – wooden blocks with roughly painted windows and doors, bricks and trees – come across as striking in their naivety.
“They were only a dollar each,” she says. “They’re sweet and kind of sad.”
Similar is a grouping of raku-fired spherical pots on the mantelpiece.
“I wonder why people made them, but the saddest thing is that someone has gotten rid of them,” Cami says.
On the coffee table are tactile experimental resin sculptures by Alicia King. An oversized wicker lamp and a pair of hand-carved, handpainted Chinese chairs add more visual variety to the room. Hanging in her bedroom is a map of Tasmania, another op-shop find.
“I want to perfect my knowledge of Tasmania,” Cami says. “It’s beautiful. It’s home. It’s difficult to envisage ever moving back to France. But my accent has stuck with me. When I speak to other French people they know I’m from Marseille. So they know I’m a bogan or something.”