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Explore ‘Art For Life Award’ Winner Lincoln Austin’s solo exhibition at the Judith Wright Arts Centre from the 13th-27th of May 2024.

Opening Hours: Mon – Fri: 9am – 5pm

ABOUT LINCON’S PRACTICE

Modular forms, tessellating patterns, interlocking structures … Lincoln Austin’s artworks reveal systems of making and codes of construction. Artworks are open invitations to experience relational sensorial fields of abstract colour and form and perceptively co-construct them – playfully following the logic of design, meeting material limits, and imagining infinite recurrent possibilities. From intricate miniature assemblages to expansive installations to integrated architectural expressions, Austin’s works play across scales and materials, energising space, light, and time.

In a creative contract with the viewer, Austin offers building blocks for perceptual experience, providing a common platform to meet, share and exchange, as well as allowing for myriad points of departure, where we can feel individual difference and singular perspective. There is a lot of joy and sensorial pleasure in these skillfully crafted immersive and speculative architectures.

Artworks escape their own frames while working to frame, contain and then release the viewing experience. Performance and poetry are intrinsic dimensions at play. In this immediacy, the works can softly connect to inner emotional states, enfolding the viewer, echoing the structural complexities of our own making, growing, adapting and senescing throughout our lives’ journeys. Experiences of struggle and resolution, vulnerability and strength, openness and protection, become apparent. Though working within a systemic logic and a disciplined truth to material, Austin’s works release rather than define the possibilities of form, expressing an intense optimism.

Based in south-east Queensland, Lincoln Austin has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving numerous grants and prizes, and participating in forums, workshops, residencies, artist talks, cultural exchanges, university teaching, and mentorships. In 2021, a 20-year survey exhibition, Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us, was curated for Ipswich Art Gallery by Samantha Littley, Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA. Austin has produced 18 large-scale public projects and has been awarded two prizes for Art and Architecture by the Australian Institute of Architects. Austin’s works are held in many public and private collections, including Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Artist biography written by Beth Jackson (2022).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Song by Pet Shop Boys

Ask me why,

I say it’s most unusual

How can I even try to explain

Why today I feel like dancing

Singing like lovers sing

When I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing?

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

Ask me when, (ta ra ra ra)

I say it started when I met you (ta ra ra ra ra ra)

And ever since then I knew that the past couldn’t last

For right now, I think I’m running

A race that I know I’m gonna win

And I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

If people say I’m crazy, I tell ’em that it’s true

Let them watch with amazement

Say it won’t last beyond breakfast

It’s a phase he’s going through

Denigrate or speculate on what I’m going through

Because it isn’t the sort of thing I would normally do

Ask me what, (ta ra ra ra)

I say I think it’s good for you (ta ra ra ra ra)

Believe it or not, I know where it’s all leading to

I feel like taking all my clothes off

Dancing to the right of Spring

And I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of –

This kind of thing

Source: LyricFind.

Songwriters: Christopher Lowe / Neil Tennant

Image: Lincoln Austin. Don’t get carried away with yourself. 2020. Nylon fabric, carbon fibre, brass, 300 x 300 x 300 cm.