Mitch Cairns, 9-5, 2025, oil on linen, framed, 124.50 x 104.50 x 5.50 cm, TCG23675
(photo: The Commercial)

"One of the largest canvases is 9-5, which combines the rotund numerals of the workaday phrase with several extinguished candles and other elements in a tight, flat compositional space. The expression came to Cairns while he was reflecting on his late nan, who, in 1978, launched Australia’s first skincare salon for men – the Face of Man in the Strand Arcade.

‘When I was studying at the National Art School [NAS], I’d often head into town to meet her for lunch and we’d go to Soup Plus,’ he recalls fondly. ‘I was thinking about her catching the train into the city every day from where she lived and what a standard working day used to be. So, this painting is a conflation of “9 to 5” as a commonusage phrase about time and labour, and candles as an early form of light.’ As Cairns readily acknowledges, ‘9 to 5’ ain’t what it used to be. The term feels almost quaint. ‘We seem to have a slippery relationship to time and work now,’ he says. ‘And artists work endlessly. We’re like the perfect workers because we don’t ever stop.’

Cairns calls this, and several others in the group, a ‘perfume painting’, a metaphor that elegantly captures the process of how ideas are nurtured in his imagination, gradually coalescing into something formal, compositional and eventually pictorial. ‘It was enough for me to think, I don’t know how to make an image of “9 to 5”,’ he says. ‘There was no image construct already made.’"

Mitch Cairns interview with Tony Magnusson for Look magazine, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Feb-March 2025