A day in the life of artist Lindy Lee's dedicated team

Lindy Lee’s four studio assistants work alongside the artist in a corrugated-iron studio just down the hill from her house, which sits on a property in the Byron Bay hinterland of northern New South Wales. Recently extended, the workshop is now an impressive 18 metres long and 6.5 metres wide with a five-metre-high ceiling.

From Tuesday to Friday, Demian Burman, Ellen Ferrier, Angelika Stepanova and Zoe Wesolowski-Fisher support Lindy in myriad ways, from digital rendering, maquette making, writing and admin to hands-on production, including working on Lindy’s immersive public sculpture Ouroboros 2024. Commissioned to celebrate the National Gallery’s 40th anniversary in 2022, Ouroboros will be installed in the Gallery forecourt in October.

They are joined two days a week by Lindy’s archivist, Elly Tucker, who documents and catalogues the artist’s ever-expanding body of work.

Here, Angelika, Ellen and Zoe take us through a typical working day for ‘Team Dark Star’, as Lindy refers to her dedicated crew.

8am: Arrival and morning brew

Ellen: We arrive sporadically between 8-10am and finish eight hours later. The studio has a tea station and I start the day with a hot chocolate, tea or decaf coffee.

Zoe: Earl Grey for me.

Angelika: These days, I like Rooibos.

10am: Team catch-up

Zoe: On Tuesday mornings we have a catch-up with the whole team to discuss the week ahead and anything new that may have come up – Lindy has new projects popping up like Whack-a-Mole! Aside from that, Lindy and I meet each morning to go over emails and admin tasks when she returns from her daily swim.

10.30am: Fire and rain drawings

Ellen: At the moment I’m working on some of Lindy’s fire and rain drawings, which involves burning numerous holes, of varying sizes and clusters, in a large sheet of thick paper with a soldering iron.

With the fire drawings, the work will be left as is, with just the burnt holes and their smoke residue marking the white paper. For the rain drawings, Lindy will then place them outside in the rain, pour Chinese ink on them and let nature work its magic.

These works on paper are often around 200 cm x 140 cm, which each of us can manage individually. But Lindy also likes to work with five-metre-long scrolls, so we do those as a team as it’s quite an immense task.

11am: Conference call

Zoe: Lindy has a virtual meeting with National Gallery assistant curator Deirdre Cannon to progress aspects of her upcoming exhibition, The ocean of yes and no, which will accompany Ouroboros’ debut.

Ellen: Included in the exhibition will be Charred Forest, an installation of five camphor laurel logs that have been charred using the Japanese shou sugi ban technique, and then drilled with conical holes in patterns that resemble falling stardust.

Zoe: We have done some test burning in the studio, but the actual logs come from Federal, a neighbouring village. A friend of Lindy’s has a property there and is doing a vast amount of land regeneration, removing problematic introduced species such as camphor laurel and replacing them with natives. We’re actually making that work in an old piggery on the property because the logs are enormous.

12.30pm: Lunch

Ellen: Lindy is incredibly generous, and part of my job is to go veg shopping on a Tuesday for us all. We are blessed to have so many amazing local organic food growers close by. Tuesday to Thursday I make lunch for everyone in Lindy’s house, which is 20 metres up the hill and an extension of the studio, really.

Angelika: Every day it looks like a feast. She makes wonderful lunches.

Ellen: I generally make lots of salads and veg dishes, and Demi takes over for Burger Fridays.

Zoe: Before Ellen joined, Lindy would prepare lunches for us every day, despite her huge workload. We encouraged her not to over-stretch herself, but it’s in Lindy’s nature to provide and take care of others.

Angelika: On special occasions we will have dinners and games nights together. Honestly, we feel like a family.

1.30pm: Studio work

Zoe: The studio has been extended and is now double the size. In early 2022, when we were working on the styrofoam maquette of Ouroboros, it took up the entire space. We had to crawl around it, and under it, in order to place the various stickers indicating where the holes would go in the final work, which is 13 tonnes of mirror-polished stainless steel.

Ellen: The maquette came to us in pieces from Urban Art Projects (UAP) in Brisbane, who are fabricating Ouroboros, and we assembled it in the studio using large metal staples and tape. It was a fun time working on it together while listening to His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman on audiobook, which Lindy loves so much that it is essentially required reading for any of her assistants!

Angelika: Each of us would start by placing dots on a particular area of the model, and after a while Lindy would come along and say, ‘OK, now swap places’, because we each have a different way of placing the dots.

Ellen: It’s amazing how with something so seemingly simple, the variation of composition from one person to the next is quite discernible. We each have our own innate style and proclivities, which is evident in our mark making.

Angelika: We should intuitively feel where to place the dot.

Ellen: Be one with the dot!

Zoe: Ouroboros is 4.2 metres at its highest point and about eight metres in diameter. There are over 12,000 perforations that have been individually cut by hand, one segment at a time. Lindy selected six hole sizes, the smallest being 16mm and the largest 140mm in diameter.

3pm: Research and development

Angelika: We are all involved in studio production work, but we also have areas of expertise and responsibility. I am good at detail and making works that require a fine touch. This afternoon I’m experimenting with jewellery by carving a ring out of wax for a soon-to-be-announced project. I’ve been with Lindy for four-and-a-half years now.

Ellen: Lindy calls Angelika the Mistress of Delicacy because of the beauty of her fine detail work. Zoe has been here the longest – six and a half years – and she looks after a lot of the admin. She has an incredible memory and knows Lindy’s practice and schedule inside out.

Angelika: Demi has been here for five and a half years and he is extremely talented at 3D rendering, which he actually taught himself. Lindy and Demi worked very closely in the initial stages of the design for Ouroboros.

Ellen: And I’m the baby, as I’ve been here for only two and a half years. I work with Lindy on writing tasks including proposals and pitches for various projects. I also help with scale models, as I used to make a lot of these during my architecture studies.

4pm: Walkies

Zoe: Demi is very much the uncle to Lindy’s three Scottish terriers, and one of his duties is to take Mae Mae, Mungo and Kevin for an hour’s walk around the neighbourhood every afternoon. The relationship between Demi and the ‘kids’ is mutually affectionate!

5pm: Hometime

Ellen: Whoever is last to leave will turn off the lights and close up the studio. We all live between 10 and 30 minutes away. Zoe actually grew up on this property, which is multi-occupancy, and her parents still live here.

Ouroboros was commissioned to celebrate the National Gallery's 40th anniversary in 2022 and is due to be completed October 2024.