A conversation with artist and bike enthusiast Carol Green
Talking with the cool and creative Carol Green (She/Her) about bike life, food and taking a trip down the Karangahape memory lane - anybody else remember the cafe Brazil?!
Who are your creative inspirations?
A painter that I really liked as a kid is Dufy, he’s a French painter! Impressionist style with really bright colours and quite illustrative. I also really like kids book illustrators such as Quentin Blake, that sort of really scratchy style.
What got you into bike life?
Well I grew up in Cambridge in the UK, which is a big bike city, so my whole life I thought biking was normal! And then I moved here and I didn’t see anyone that looked like me biking – this was 20 years ago and the only people riding bikes were dudes in lycra. So I got a car and drove around like everyone else did.
However, at one point I didn’t have a car for 3 months, and in that time I realised I could get to most of the places I wanted to go without a car. Eventually when I did get another car, it just sat there most of the time, just rotting on the driveway, and I paid to get it WOF’d and all those other things that you pay for when you have a car, and then I thought… I don’t actually need this thing, so I got rid of it and it was marvellous!
What are your thoughts on Electric bikes?
People would say to me “You’ll love it, get an electric bike, It’ll be great”. I thought about it for a year and worked out how much money I didn’t spend on a car, and then I thought why not. What it’s actually done is cut down my public transport use quite a bit, before I used to do 60% bike and 40% bus and train, and now it's 90% bike and 10% public transport.
Everyone says that electric bikes are a game changer, but it really is! Especially when you’re coming from far away.
One of your works is about Transport choice is a feminist issue- would you like to elaborate on this?
Transport choice is a feminist issue because -and I’m just generalising here- in the parent world, women tend to do much more of the transport than men do; groceries, school drop offs, pick ups and all that.
Having a proper choice of transportation is also a safety issue. There’s a lot of stories about women not feeling safe on trains and buses; so there’s a safety issue that needs to be addressed so that women do have the choice to take a bus at 10.30pm or that we do feel safe walking home at night after an event.
So many women I know would never walk home after an event but men would never think twice about it -and are often surprised to hear that women wouldn’t do it! It just never occurred to them that safety is something that we have to think about all the time, therefore, I think providing safety and choice of transportation is really important.
Source: https://carolgreen.net/folio/transport-posters/
I’ve had a cheeky geez at your gram and it looks like you’re quite the foodie, do you have a favourite place?
My instagram has kind’ve turned into a food gram… I do try and post work there but sometimes I take a look back and I think oh god…
I can only think back so far, the latest one was a bowl of Laksa from the Buddhist temple out in the wilds of East Auckland. If you’re ever out that way, it's definitely worth the stop for Lunch.
I also really rate Uncle Mans whenever I’m on Karangahape Road!
Ah that brings me onto my next question, what’s your favourite spot on Karangahape Road?
I really like St Kevins Arcade, it’s a real jewel of Karangahape Road and whoever happens to sit at the front window seat at Bestie is onto a winner.
Taking it back to bikes, the Electric Bike team down at East Street because they know what they’re doing and they’re just really nice people. The shop has become at least 4x bigger than it was before! Throughout lockdown they were doing their expansion which shows you that people are really keen on electric bikes.
Also can I put in a shout out for a bit of Karangahape Road past; Brazil which was a cafe in the Norman Ng building. Brazil was something out of Bladerunner- the coffee machine looked like it was going to sprout legs and walk away, and the coffee was the sort of thing that would turn your mouth inside out, in a good way!
What are your thoughts on the new Karangahape street updates?
I was on this Bike to the Future ride that Emma McInnes organised 10 years ago and it’s taken this long to get here. It’s so much better than it was before, anything’s better than it was before really. It will be great once it's complete! I cycled from upper Queen Street and there’s a new bit of pink cycleway that goes down to the light path. At night I quite often ride past people doing photoshoots because it’s so photogenic, except I don’t know at what point they’re going to clean the glass because each panel either says Jesus or has a penis drawn on it -the two classics of graffiti.
What are your some of your memories of Karangahape Road?
My first job when I got here was at a printer business at Upper Queen Street. I needed to pay my rent so I asked where’s the nearest bank, and they said go up this way, there's a street along there called K Road, go up there. I went up and it was the first place where I felt like home, there was sari shops, and people smoking on the street, and it felt really different from the rest of Auckland that I had already seen, there was ethnically diverse people and sort of weird little shops selling all sorts of stuff and I thought, this is it, this is the place for me.
Check out Carol’s new work:
A graphic novel called Kidshare: Lockdown perceptions in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This graphic novel shares the results from a nationwide online survey with children that sought to understand their neighbourhood perceptions and experiences during the COVID-19 Lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020 with a focus on child wellbeing.
Source: https://carolgreen.net/folio/kidshare-lockdown-perceptions-in-aotearoa-new-zealand/
https://carolgreen.net
https://twitter.com/carolgreen
https://www.instagram.com/carol.greenie/
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