AustLit

Artist: Lincoln Austin

Birth date, place: 1974, Stirling, South Australia

A graduate of visual arts and theatre design in South Australia in the 1990s, Lincoln Austin's early career was in the Adelaide theatre sector designing stage sets and props. Now based in Ipswich, Queensland, Austin is known for his large-scale public sculptures and intricate collages and constructions that draw on science and mathematics to explore materiality and metaphor.

Over a four-year period in the late 1990s, Lincoln Austin undertook numerous theatre design projects in South Australia, most notably for Adelaide's Centre for the Performing Arts (Austin, 2014). His transition to a full-time visual arts practice was prompted by a desire to shift away from the illusionism of theatre (UQAM, 2013). Austin is primarily a sculptor, though his work defies easy categorisation, crossing the boundaries of two- and three-dimensionality (UQAM, 2013). His Imperfect Pattern series, commencing in 2002, presents geometric patterns as collages of colour and shape, each introducing a subtle mathematical irregularity (UQAM, 2013; Institute of Modern Art, 2009). The series has grown in scale and complexity, with his fiftieth work, Field of Vision (2009), described as a 'superstructure' spread over three planes (Institute of Modern Art, 2009). More recently Austin has embarked on the Bell Jar series – three-dimensional geometric 'puzzles' enclosed in glass domes and constructed to generate optical effects (Ballard, 2014). Each of Austin's major series has been widely exhibited through commercial, public and tertiary galleries in Queensland, where he is now based, and in other Australian cities (Austin, 2014). Austin has also created a significant body of public art in Brisbane, including the 500 metre-squared Ebb and Flow (2010) mural as part of the Go Between Bridge development. All of Austin's works, whether small or large in scale, draw heavily on mathematics, poetry and metaphor and concern similar themes of contradiction and confusion, and boundaries between the Ideal and physical (Austin, 2014; UQAM, 2013)

References:

Lincoln Austin, 'CV', 2014 - www.lincoln-austin.com.au

Brett Ballard, 'BMG ART exhibition', 2009 - www.lincoln-austin.com.au

Institute of Modern Art, 'Field of Vision: Interview with Robert Leonard', 2009 - http://www.artabase.net/exhibition/1778-lincoln-austin

The University of Queensland Art Museum, 'Ten Years of Things: Curators Samantha Littley and Gordon Craig and exhibiting artist, Lincoln Austin, talk about the exhibition', 20 February 2013 - http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/content/ten-years-of-things

'In my work there are perennial themes: transparency, fragility, reflectivity, pattern, geometry. All my works can be described through these terms.'

(Lincoln Austin, 2009)

Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane