Jimi Hendrix (Double Exposure), Tom Mitchell. 1977

How did this exhibition come together?
It was a bit of a treasure hunt. [Those featured in the show] are all artists, but a lot of them had lived such interesting lifestyles that the art was a byproduct of living a really cool way of life. They weren’t really artists who were trying to search out galleries to show their work. [For example,] this guy had been living in a tent for the last four years, and had no telephone, no email — he’d never sent an email or seen the internet — and by chance we’d put his name up on a telephone pole about seven miles up the road, and he’d stopped into a shop and gave us a call. It just all sort of came together. The whole consensus was, at the end, that this was a pretty amazing core group of people from back in the late ’60s who were now together again. And most of them had never even seen each other’s art.

The artists didn’t work together in the 1960s?
They had worked together in the sense of living together. One guy had lived in a tree house for the past 40 years and he was one of the forefathers in exploring dolphin and whale consciousness. He had assembled a whole group of artists. He bought a plot of land in the 1970s. They all lived in treehouses, ran about naked and swam in pools and did all that kind of stuff.