All The Careers I’ve Considered Doing In Order To Finance My Art Career
Claudia Kogachi

For artists navigating precarious livelihoods, their art is caught in a constant dance with odd jobs and daydreams as they try to make ends meet. In All the Careers I’ve Considered Doing in Order to Finance My Art Career (2020), Claudia Kogachi depicts herself as a nanny, landscaper, electrician, and real estate agent; roles both real and imagined. This series of oversized rugs was inspired by the uncertainty of the first Covid-19 lockdown — what Kogachi describes as the ‘push and pull of not really knowing if you were doing the right thing, or even if it was still viable’ — and captures the ongoing doubt that artists often juggle. Rug tufting, a medium that she picked up during the lockdown, gives these pieces a juicy burst of colour and texture, and the works brim with Kogachi’s signature humour, as well as an emotional truth drawn from her own life. The series was first exhibited at Artspace Aotearoa in 2020, as part of their New Artists Show.

Claudia Kogachi is an artist known for her lively paintings and tufted rugs. For Kogachi, life is equally as malleable as fiction and she blends autobiographical details with fiction and fantasy, bending the narrative truth of each towards each other until they meet. Friends and family members pop up in vignettes alongside the artist herself, with Kogachi’s work negotiating real emotions and experiences through imagined situations — whether it’s being smitten with a new love, or having a fierce rivalry with her mother. In recent years, she has often collaborated with her partner, woodworker Josephine Jelicich. Kogachi is based in Tāmaki Makaurau, although she was born in Awaji-Shima, Japan, and continues to spend time in Hawai‘i, where her mother’s family live.