UPCOMING SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE LOCK-UP

From 3 December 2022 – 5 February 2023, Alex will present a new solo show at The Lock-Up in Newcastle. The exhibition will explore the possibilities of combining glass and stone to consider the themes of memory and place and how they relate to Australia’s history of migration. Inspired by the archives of the Electric Lamp Manufacturers of Newcastle Glassworks and Lenora Glassworks, as well as stories of the many ship-jumpers incarcerated at The Lock-Up, the exhibition will engage with Australia's colonial past as a penal colony and as a place for forgetting, both deliberate and accidental.  

In combining glass and stone, Alex will seek to reflect on the experience of the prisoners once held in the lightless, windowless cells of The Lock-Up. Glass being a medium of light (hope/memory) and stone being a medium of permanence (place/history), the two mediums have an opportunity to intermingle with the confined architecture of a place that has its many stories written on its walls. 

In preparation for the exhibition, Alex will undergo a six-week residency at Canberra Glassworks to develop skills in glass techniques. The exhibition and residency have been supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

ABC TV: ART WORKS

Recently the team from ABC TV’s Art Works joined Alex in his studio to discuss his art processes and inspiration. You can catch the episode now on ABC iView.

Rome Residency

Alex has just begun a two-month residency at the prestigious American Academy in Rome which has been made possible through the Australia Council for the Arts / Mordant Family Fellowship which he was awarded in 2019. The American Academy is a leading centre for independent studies and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities, and supports innovative artists, writers, and scholars living and working together in a dynamic international community.

Australian War Memorial: For Every Drop Shed In Anguish

Announced on 15 June, 2021 Alex Seton’s proposed work, Every drop shed in anguish will be commissioned for the grounds of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Seton was unanimously selected by veterans and their loved ones to deliver this work of art. ‘For Every Drop Shed in Anguish’, a field of sculpted Australian marble droplets suggesting blood, sweat and tears, will be installed in the Sculpture Garden in 2023.

This major commission will recognise the sufferings of war and service and will take two years to make. When completed it will be installed as a field of sculpted Australian pearl marble droplets.

Alex says, "every droplet has a unique shape, defined by its delicate surface tension, as if about to burst. Their rounded liquid forms suggests blood, sweat or tears – for every drop ever shed in anguish. Most importantly, when touched these forms reveal themselves to have an inner strength and resilience that provides hope and promise of healing."

The Australian War Memorial announces a new sculpture to recognise and commemorate the suffering caused by war and military service.

Read More Here

Seton named Grand Prize Winner of Sovereign Asian Art Prize

Alex Seton, Oilstone 05_Corrosion, 2019. Bianca Carrara marble, epoxy and tarp, 54 x 110 x 53cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sovereign Art Foundation, Hong Kong.

The 2020 Sovereign Asian Art Prize:
Winners Announced, Alex Seton Named Grand Prize Winner

Hong Kong – The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF) today announced Australian artist Alex Seton as winner of The 2020 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and US$30,000 for his work, Oilstone 05_Corrosion (2019), a chemically-transformed marble sculpture resembling a Yamaha boat engine. The Prize is the 16th edition of Asia’s longest established and most prestigious award for contemporary art.

Saba Qizilbash, of Pakistan, and Made Wiguna Valasara, of Indonesia, are awarded The Vogue Hong Kong Women’s Art Prize of US$5,000, and The Public Vote Prize of US$1,000, respectively, for their works Inbezelment, an installation of detailed graphite drawings on mylar paper, and Daily parade, a hand-stitched, embossed canvas evocative of traditional Balinese painting.

Winner Alex Seton is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, photography, video and installation, but is best known for his use of marble carving: playing with, inverting and exaggerating techniques of classical statuary and monument to create works that reflect on the contemporary world. Oilstone 05_Corrosion (2019) presents a resolutely man-made object, rendered in white statuary marble with a geological age of 200 million years, deliberately smashed, reassembled and prematurely aged with hydrochloric acid. By accelerating the natural process of corrosion, Seton recontextualises the material’s natural history, challenging its status as resolute, linear and unchangeable.

Alex was nominated into The Prize by curator, researcher, and academic, Dr Mikala Tai, Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney.

Seton said of his win:

“What a brilliant surprise! Thank you to The Sovereign Art Foundation for this honour and of course an enormous thank you to the brilliant Mikala Tai for nominating me. Without curator advocates like Mikala it’s almost impossible to stand out in the wonderful roar of contemporary art now. This year’s field of artists have my admiration and heartfelt congratulations for their bold and sensitive works, and I’m proud to show alongside them together as artists of the Asia- Pacific region. It is after all, where all the most exciting art is being made now.”

88 independent art professionals from across Asia Pacific nominated mid-career artists from 26 countries into the Prize, with a total of 611 entries received. The 31 finalists from 18 countries and territories were shortlisted by a judging panel including writer, curator, museum director David Elliott; Jan Dalley, Arts Editor of the Financial Times; Jiyoon Lee, art historian, curator, writer and consultant; artist and professor Miao Xiaochun; and esteemed artist Zhou Li. A Hong Kong-based panel comprised of architect, artist, collector and educator William Lim; Executive Director of Asia Society, Alice Mong; and Elaine Lin, Head of Collections at Asia Art Archive, weighed in with scores from the Finalists Exhibition, which were aggregated with those of the international panel to determine the final winners.

Read More here…

Residency: Mordant Family/Australian Council Affiliated Fellowship

Alex is thrilled to have been awarded the coveted Mordant Family/Australian Council Affiliated Fellowship to study in Rome. The Fellowship will enable two months in residence at the prestigious American Academy.

“I am pretty excited to receive the Fellowship,” Alex says. “It’s a gratifying validation after years of practice, and a rare opportunity to take time out of everyday studio to focus upon investigating new ideas. I’ve found been increasingly difficult leave aside time solely for the act of discovery. At the American Academy I’ll have plenty of time and access research facilities that I wouldn’t normally.”

Alex will use the time to research the use of the shroud in traditional Roman statuary.

“In my own art practice I’ve used the traditional device of carving a lot of soft fabric as drapery in marble to imply the figure, but specifically to prompt the audience to imagine themselves in the position of wearer, Alex says. “I’ve used this to talk about political issues today and to promote empathy, in such areas as Australia’s asylum seeker and refugee policies. 

“Doing this in stone has had the advantage of not being easily swept aside, to fix a moment in time that many want to ignore. But under modern environmental conditions even stone loses its status as the most permanent or resolute of materials. I am going to Rome to study vast treasure of marble statuary that sits outdoors eroding under the many atmospheric chemicals of modern pollution.”

“When even stone, a material of thousands of years of human story telling is under threat -you know humanity and the environment is at a dangerous tipping point. I’m going to investigate and research those specific implications to material and the language around it.”

“The American Academy is a great opportunity professionally to engage with fellow artists and academics. I’m looking forward to talking with restorers and conservators to further my technical understanding and challenge any preconceptions I may have of the material I think I know well,” he says.

Alex will take up the residency in April-May 2020.

Exhibition: Cargo

Cargo from Alex Seton on Vimeo.

Alex is pleased to share details of his upcoming solo exhibition at Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, opening on Friday 28 September, 6-8pm and continuing until 20 October, 2018.

Cargo will feature new marble sculptures depicting highly compressed bales of clothing, of the kind found in the second-hand clothes industry. Each garment packed into these volumes has its own history and story to tell. Together, they evoke a tangled mass of humanity, the mesh of needs and concerns, environments and economies that connect us all.

Spanning both floors of Sullivan+Strumpf's Sydney gallery, Cargo includes six hand-carved bales of clothing. Over the last four years, Seton’s work has responded to the asylum seeker debate and Australia’s offshore policies. In Cargo, the free and profit-driven journey of bales of our discarded clothes stands in potent counterpoint to the perilous and stymied journey of the asylum seeker. The exhibition takes a step back to reflect on the larger economic and environmental systems that perpetuate our privilege.

In spending innumerable slow hours carving these flocked effigies, Seton pauses to consider the environmental, cultural and economic impact of these systems on those that bear the burden of our dispensation. The complexity of the bales’ surfaces also nod to the tropes of classical statuary, the shrouds, drapes and folds of cloth of a European marble tradition. Here, individual garments are rendered almost unrecognisable, compressed into bales designed for circulation in transnational markets.

Cargo is at once political, personal and biographic. Mirroring the human body's seven-year replacement cycle, the bales presented in the exhibition are based on Seton’s own clothes accumulated in his studio over the last seven years. The stone from which the bales are carved each refer to places and periods from the artist's life: his youth spent in the area near the Wombeyan Caves in New South Wales; years of study in traditional statuary of Bianca Carrara; exploration of the palate range of Statuary and Badiglio, and finding of a sense of place and appreciation of local textures and colour in Katoomba Green.

In this way Seton places himself within these transnational stories. Cargo offers us an encounter with our own complicity; not only in the production of landfill sites that will outlive us several times over and the destruction of local textiles industries. It also asks us to reflect on our role in the perpetuation of systems that fuel profit while turning a blind eye to the human and environmental costs of our way of life.

Throughout his practice, Seton has often used clothing and fabric to speak to the body and how it participates in the systems that structure our world; economic, geographic and social. From the ubiquitous hoodie politicised by the shooting of Trayvon Martin, to the makeshift tarp shelter of the refugee and the empty life jackets washed ashore the Cocos Islands, cloth serves as a humble reminder of the deep and messy entanglement of the personal and political. 

Exhibition: All We Can't See

Alex will once again be exhibiting as part of All We Can't See, which is touring to Melbourne as part of Melbourne Art Week.

All We Can't See brings together some of Australia's most prominent artists to respond to the The Nauru Files, leaked incident reports written by staff in Australia’s detention centre on Nauru between 2013 and 2015, and published in August 2016 by The Guardian.

These files detail 2,116 separate incidents, including many cases of assault, sexual abuse, self-harm, child abuse and abhorrent living conditions endured by asylum seekers and refugees in the care of the Australian Government. Despite the harrowing nature of the files, the situation remains and the abuse is ongoing.

In the absence of media access to the island, the objective of All We Can't See is to illustrate these stories through creative expression, using art to shed light on all we can’t see.

The exhibition runs from Tuesday 31st July – Saturday 11th August at FortyFiveDownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne.

Launch: Tactical Space Lab

TACTICAL SPACE LAB X Alex Seton
22 February 2018
6 – 8 pm
4 Lackey St, St Peters

Join Alex and the team at Tactical Space Lab for the launch of their collaborative VR project. For this studio, Seton and director Josh Harle have created experiments pushing the VR audience to override their most fundamental instincts and challenge their physical awareness when navigating the virtual space.

TACTICAL SPACE LAB
Tactical Space Lab is a research initiative focusing on the intersection of art, technology, and critical theory. It is conceived as a space to host, nourish, and nurture artistic practices and projects that critically explore emerging technology – particularly through innovation in the field of mapping and spatial representation – and was founded by Dr Josh Harle in 2013 as a platform for the continuation of doctoral research projects.

Tactical Space Lab is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

Tactical Space Lab has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Residency: Tactical Space Lab

From 29 January – 9 February 2018 Alex will be in residence at Sydney’s Tactical Space Lab.

Tactical Space Lab is a research initiative focusing on the intersection of art, technology, and critical theory. It is conceived as a space to host, nourish, and nurture artistic practices and projects that critically explore emerging technology – particularly through innovation in the field of mapping and spatial representation.

For the next five months the lab will transform its exhibition space into an experimental Virtual Reality (VR) lab.

While on residency, Alex will be researching the power of augmented reality to create sculptural works and spatial interventions that break material and engineering constraints and would be impossible in the real world.

Artists Joan Ross, Jason Wing and John A. Douglas will also be participating in the lab.

“Despite their diverse and unique practices, what each of these artists share is an examination of the relationship between bodies and spaces,” lab director Dr Josh Harle says.

“This is something that’s fundamental to room-scale VR, where the user is walking around and interacting with the virtual space they inhabit. Trying to figure out this relationship is what the most interesting VR experiences to date share, and the studio is a great chance to bring the artists’ extensive knowledge into the conversation.”

Acquisition: Bendigo Art Gallery

Alex is excited to share that his work Sometimes the dead are more alive than the living (2017) has been acquired by Bendigo Art Gallery as part of their permanent collection. 

Bendigo Art Gallery is one of the oldest and largest regional galleries in Australia, established in 1887.  Bendigo Art Gallery's collection is extensive, with an emphasis on 19th century European art and Australian art from the 1800's, alongside a strong collection of contemporary Australian art.  The collection includes painting, sculpture, ceramics, decorative arts, photography, works on paper, and Australian art. Alex's work will join a strong collection including artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Bill Henson, Dale Frank, Jan Nelson, Fiona Hall, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kit Webster, and Ben Armstrong.

Over the last decade, Bendigo Art Gallery has cemented its reputation for presenting innovative international exhibitions alongside a dynamic and varied suite of public programs and events. Bendigo Art Gallery attracts a diverse audience from metropolitan Melbourne, and from across Victoria and Australia.

Residency: Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop

Alex is pleased to be in residence at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from 1 – 14 August, thanks to the Reach Scotland Programme, which targets artists living and working outside Edinburgh who would benefit from time working at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop..

The Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is a centre for production, research and learning. As well as specialist production workshop facilities, there are studios accommodating a peer network and spaces designed to accommodate research, presentation and learning.

Their exciting program constantly explores innovative ways to bring audiences closer to the process of making art through education, partnership working and open access to our facilities, and Alex has been enjoying interacting with the students, artists, curators and public that pass through the space.

Alex is grateful to have the chance to experience Edinburgh and its vibrant arts culture, especially during Festival time!

Exhibition: I WAS HERE at Fremantle Arts Centre

I WAS HERE
Fremantle Arts Centre, WA
22 July – 16 September 2017

Alex Seton, I Was Here 2017, Bianca Carrara marble and ink, 75 x 180 x 2 cm each

In Fremantle Arts Centre’s exhibition I WAS HERE, the world is flipped upside down, long held beliefs are disproved and fact replaced fiction as seven artists grapple with what’s real, imagined, or forgotten over time. Comprising photographic and sculptural works, I WAS HERE is a fascinating commentary on history itself and our relationship to the past.

Anna Richardson curated the exhibition, featuring Robyn Stacey (NSW), Tom Buckland (ACT), Alex Seton (NSW), Amy Spiers (VIC), Yhonnie Scarce (VIC), Kate McMillan (UK), and Wanda Gillespie (NZ).

Seton has contributed three works to the exhibition.  Left Turn at Alberqueque (2017) is a stop-motion video work depicting the artist gradually chipping away at a limestone tunnel. The title of the work makes reference to the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, who, emerging from the earth at any given site, would declare where he had made a wrong turn. 

I Was Here is a work in marble exploring the act of making and the ways in which humans attempt to apprehend history through the objects we create. Two large sheets of Bianco Carrara marble lean against the wall, one inscribed with the words ‘I Was Here’, the other bearing the inkblots that are the traces of this act.

Proof of Absence (2017) is composed of three pieces of limestone, which were pulled from beneath the sea off the coast of Vanuatu. They form part of a body of evidence assembled during the ‘undiscovery’ of Sandy Island, thought to be West of Vanuatu in the Coral Sea until its existence was disproved in 2013. The work reminds us that history itself is malleable, subject to errors and change.

Also on at FAC is Island, a solo exhibition by Ian Strange. Strange and Seton previously showed alongside one another in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial: Dark Heart, at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Countercurrents at Samstag Museum of Art

Countercurrents
Samstag Museum of Art
3 March – 14 April 2017

Someone Else's Problem 2015, marble dust, resin, Tasmanian oak, stainless steel, LED lights, dimensions variable. Installation view: Installation Contemporary, Sydney Contemporary, 2015

The Samstag Museum of Art is delighted to present two special exhibitions for the 2017 Adelaide Festival of Arts. The Ocean After Nature and Countercurrents feature the work of twenty-three Australian and international artists and collaborations, exploring our relationship with and connections to the oceans through new media, sculpture, installation, painting and photography.

Presented in partnership with Independent Curators International, New York, The Ocean After Nature reflects on the complicated planetary effects that humanity and the oceans have on each other today. In response to that project, the Samstag Museum of Art has invited a number of artists – each with a connection to Australia, New Zealand and/or the Pacific Islands – to probe the unique implications of this complex relationship for our region in the compelling Countercurrents exhibition.

Countercurrents features the work of Daniel Boyd, Baden Pailthorpe, Alex Seton, Fiona Tan, Angela Tiatia, James Tylor, and Ken & Julia Yonetani.

Young & Free | An Australian Discourse

Alex Seton is pleased to be included in the exhibition Young & Free | An Australian Discourse, at Bega Valley Regional Gallery, from 10 February- 18 March 2017.

Flag Stack 2011, Tinted Perspex, 8 x 36 x 68 cm

Leading Australian artists Abdul Abdullah, Joan Ross, Alex Seton, Tony Albert and Liam Benson deliver works from their recent history that expose, play with and question broad contentious contemporary themes of Australian culture.

Young & Free showcases artists whose work discusses ideas of colonialism, nationalism, and hot button issues around immigration policy, patriotism, Indigenous affairs and gender identity.

The Island, Newcastle Art Gallery

Alex Seton is pleased to announce the solo survey exhibition The Island, at Newcastle Art Gallery from 18 February - 7 May 2017.

Paper Armada 2015, Bianca Carrara marble, dimensions variable.

This solo exhibition contemplates and questions Australia’s role in the asylum debate. ‘The Island’ as a concept can be a safe place of refuge, isolated geographically and ideologically from the humanitarian challenges the world is currently grappling with. Alternatively it can take on a more sinister tone as a place deserted for those who have survived a perilous sea journey only to be marooned, stateless, detained, looking to the horizon for help.

In Europe today, the mass movement of refugees and asylum seekers displaced by war and poverty is history repeated. Where once immigrants were embraced as a means to drive the health and economy of nations, today we turn inwards as the ideology of walls and fences become potent political capital. Seton expertly transforms and manipulates his marble sculptures into emphatic motifs and metaphors of these current socio-political themes and narratives. 

Within the exhibition: oars, life rafts and life vests are washed up on the shores of the 'The Island'. A key work on loan from The Art Gallery of South Australia, Someone died trying to have a life like mine 2013 was first shown in the exhibition Dark Heart at the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. This major work of art is inspired by an actual event where 28 life jackets were found on a beach of the Cocos Islands within Australian territory, the owners still remain unidentified.

2016 KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE

Alex Seton is honoured to be included in the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Fort Kochi, India. Curator Sudarshan Shetty says of the Biennale's theme Forming in the pupil of an eye:

Forming in the pupil of an eye is not an image of one reality but a reflection of multiple realities and of multiple possibilities in time. It does not question notions of reality, but instead layers many. As its own process, Forming in the pupil of an eye comes from that junction of the physiological with the conceptual. It is an acknowledgement that there is something essential in the way we look at the world, that it is multiple in nature. Forming in the pupil of an eye brings that multiplicity of experience together within the space of Kochi-Muziris Biennale and perhaps to spill over into the world at large.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale runs 12 December 2016 - 29 March 2017.

Finalist, Wynne Prize 2016, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Eternally Yours, 2016
Molong marble, spray lacquer
97 x 70 x 67 cm

The Wynne Prize is awarded annually for 'the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists’. This open competition is judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. Finalists are displayed in an exhibition at the Gallery from 16 July - 9 October 2016.

The words on this work were penned by my terminally ill friend Elizabeth Caplice, battling cancer at the age of 32. Liz was to spray the text in person, but took a turn for the worse that confined her to bed. Defacing this traditional 'vanitas' is an act of defiance and a tribute to her eloquence and courage.

Elizabeth died at 1.35am on 12 July 2016. She had per parents and closest friends at her side.