Who is Erin Pattison?
I’m a stereotypical millennial artist from Melbourne and I love it. I love oat milk, have a septum piercing, a dumb haircut and a very relaxed and fluctuating relationship with vegetarianism. I’m also a fool who loves holding a microphone and has won a handful of awards for writing jokes about being bisexual.
What would you do differently from what you do now?
No clue, to be fair I’m not 100% sure what exactly I’m doing right now.
Who inspires you and why?
Way too many people to list, we’d need a bottle of wine and a whole houseparty for me to make it through that list. But the things that all of these people have in common is a fierce love of community, a focus on collaboration and a lack of ego, also mad creativity.
What would you do to make a difference in the world?
Make it mandatory for everyone to work a minimum of 1 year in customer service.
Favourite holiday destination and why?
I’m 25 and have never taken a holiday that my family didn’t organize and pay for, instead I cannibalise my free time and any money that isn’t for food or rent for theatre. But Noosa’s nice.
When friends come to town, what attraction would you take them to and why?
I’m a sucker for a good museum or gallery, but the best thing about living in Melbourne is usually my friends come down with their own wish list of stuff to do that I didn’t even know was happening and they end up showing me around just as much as I do them.
What are you currently reading?
I’m a real ‘multiple books at once’ person because I like having a fiction and a non-fiction on the go. At the moment my non-fiction is The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair, it’s this awesome deep dive into the histories and significance of specific shades of colour and their pigments through history. Super interesting to put things in that context where getting a good blue paint took an obscure unfarmable sea creature, months of processing and thousands of dollars instead of just being able to hit up bunnings. And my fiction is The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody, a post-apocalyptic narrative about an emerging generation of people with mental abilities who are stigmatised and hunted. I read them when I was teenager and have forgotten absolutely everything about them so I kind of get to read them again for the first time which is wild.
What are you currently listening to?
The three songs currently out from the Fangirls soundtrack (I’m counting down the days until the whole album for the show drops).Also a bunch of podcasts, if anyone’s looking for recommendations you should hit up: Maintenance Phase, You’re Wrong About, Not Another D&D Podcast (even if you don’t play D&D), and the Bald and the Beautiful.
Happiness is?
Having all the laundry done and it’s only 2.00pm.
What does the future hold for you?
Hopefully finishing up a few projects, seeing a few shows with a few friends and maybe ordering some pakoras from the indian place up the road.
Erin stars as Rory in Tatty Hennessy’s A Hundred Words for Snow – which plays at the Flight Path Theatre, Marrickville from 6 July 2021. For more information, visit: www.flightpaththeatre.org for details.
Image: Erin Pattison (supplied)