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Artist Exhibitions:
John Dahlsen is based in Byron
Bay Australia. He won the
prestigious Wynne prize at the
Art Gallery of New South
Wales in 2000 and was again a
finalist in 2003 and 2004. In
2006 he was also a finalist in
the Sulman award at the Art
Gallery of NSW...
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Artist Galleries:
John Dahlsen is represented
by various commercial
galleries within Australia.
He regularly exhibits his work
in public institutions and
within the regional gallery
network....
Further Information
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Artist Reviews:
Selected Bibliography:
John Dahlsen - Book - "Art
Insights" Book - Volume 1 2009
Fantastic Recycled Plastic -
Book - Lark Books publication
Autumn 2009
Gold Coast Bulletin - 12
September 2009
The Northern Star - 12
September 2009
Gold Coast Bulletin - 10
September 2009
Canberra Times 9 August 2009
Sublime Magazine - Mid
September Feature article
"John ...
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Collections:
Represented:
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney,
Australia.
Victorian College of the Arts
Collection.
Artbank, Sydney Australia.
Miniature Museum of
Contemporary Art - Amsterdam,
The Netherlands.
University of Western
Australia
Curtin University, Western
Australia.
Myer/Bailleiu collection.
Kerry Stokes collection.
de Rothschild Collection.
Thomas & Esther Van Vliet
collection.
Wesfarmers Collection.
Tweed River Regional Art ...
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Commissions:
Nationally regarded in
Australia, as an award winning
artist, John Dahlsen won the
prestigious Wynne prize at the
Art Gallery of NSW in 2000 and
was selected as a finalist in
2003 and again in 2004. In
2006 he was a finalist in the
Sulman Award at the Art
Gallery...
Further Information
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Artist Statement for John Dahlsen
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As you can see on my website: http://www.johndahlsen.com , I make my art from found objects, mainly plastics, sometimes driftwood and rubber, which I find on the beaches of the eastern Australian seaboard.
My recent work has resulted in assemblage wall works, sculpture, installations, photography, painting and public art projects.
The work has an equally strong environmental and purely aesthetic concern and is a direct reflection of contemporary society.
I show through my work the value of beauty, the need for environmental awareness and the amazing capacity we all have to experience deep shifts in our perception.
My creative medium shifted from painting to working with found objects as a result of an artistic accident during the mid 1990’s. I was collecting driftwood, on a remote Victorian Coastline, with the intention of making furniture and stumbled upon vast amounts of plastic ocean debris. This whole new palette of colour and shape revealing itself to me immediately affected me; I’d never seen such hues and forms before.
Since then for approximately 10 years, I scoured Australian beaches for found objects, much of which I found as washed up ‘ocean litter’. I have since discovered this is a worldwide phenomenon, affecting beaches on a global level. I bought these plastics back to my studio to sift, sort, and colour-code for my assemblages, sculptures and installations. As I worked with these objects, I became even more fascinated by the way they had been modified and weathered by the ocean and nature’s elements. My challenge as an artist was to take these found objects, which might on first meeting have no apparent dialogue, and to work with them until they speak and tell their story, which included those underlying environmental messages inherent in the use of this kind of medium.
My work is in a constant state of evolution. I see this largely as alchemical. It is the process of nature’s elements redefining the man-made that creates the initial alchemy in working with these found objects, taking the objects beyond the mundane. The second step was achieved through the transportation of these plastics to my studio and the process of sorting and assembling. A further and more vital transformation took place as I assembled them. These found objects then started to tell their story and become transformed into artworks.
I see that by making this art, it is a way of sharing my messages for the need to care for our environment with a broad audience. I feel that even if just a fraction of the viewing audience were to experience a shift in their awareness and consciousness about the environment and art, through being exposed to this artwork then it would be worth it. This stems from the fact that I believe presently humanity is at a critical point in time, with our planet currently existing in a fragile ecological state, with global warming hastening unheard of changes, all amplifying the fact that we need all the help we can get.
This is my way of making a difference, and at the same time I’m sharing a positive message about beauty that can be gained from the aesthetic experience of appreciating art, as well as giving examples of how we can recycle and reuse in creative ways. These artworks exemplify my commitment as an artist to express contemporary social and environmental concerns.
By presenting this art to the public, it will hopefully have people thinking about the deeper meaning of the work, in particular the environmental issues we currently face. I hope these works will act as a constant reminder to people about awareness.. I would like them to find enjoyment of the work on many levels and find themselves becoming identified in various ways with each of the artworks they see. I also look forward to the possible discussion that these works may generate.
I say these things as being possibilities, bearing in mind as well that comments are regularly made to me about people’s consciousness, while walking the beach, being awakened after seeing my found plastic object artworks, similarly with seeing my recycled plastic bag series, people have marvelled at the creative way I am presenting the recycling theme in an aesthetic way, with this in mind, I have trusted leaving the final alchemy of the work to the viewer, with the possibility they may experience deep perceptual shifts and have a positive aesthetic experience as they interact with my art.
I also developed new works in 2003 using recycled plastic bags as the primary medium, “Blue River” is one of my most well known works using this medium.
This work was a finalist in the 2003 Wynne prize at the Art Gallery of NSW Australia. My recycled plastic bag artwork is a departure from the more recognizable assemblage works in which I used plastics and other detritus collected from the Eastern seaboard, “Thong Totems” which won the Wynne Prize in 2000 being a good example.
With this recycled plastic bag work, apart from wishing to express obvious environmental messages, I have been particularly interested in the brilliance of the colours and textures available to me in working with this medium.
I am constantly surprised to see the variations in these plastics, very much like how I am intrigued by the beach found objects I have collected over the years. The most recent example of my working in this medium was in 2005, when I was artist in residence at Jefferson City Missouri, USA. Here I made a series of totemic installations with thousands of plastic bags in clear acrylic tubes for their sculpture walk.
I imagine these plastic bags, which mostly have a lifespan of many years, are possibly facing extinction, as governments are beginning to impose deterrents to people using them. In the mean time I am able as a contemporary visual artist, to use these recycled materials, to create artworks which, I hope express a certain beauty, as well as containing their own unique environmental messages.
My foray into working with driftwood assemblages, began in 1998 and continued until 2004. An article described the driftwood assemblages, which I exhibited in a solo show at the John Gordon Gallery, Coffs Harbour in early 2004 as follows:
“John Dahlsen isn’t your average artist. A bold statement to make but appropriate after you realize the sheer depth and determination which goes into the work this man has produced over the past seven years. Although he has been within art circles for much longer than that, it is only in the most recent years, which have seen Dahlsen create a different form of art with environmental messages and strong statements. It is ‘found’ object art, be that organic or inorganic.
He would be seen scavenging beaches in search of plastics, specific colours and sizes. He is also known for venturing along the edge of Victoria alone in search of driftwood. Boat trips, four-wheel-drive tours and scaling 40 meter-high cliffs, were all part of the process for this driftwood exhibition and Dahlsen admits at times there were death-defying moments grabbing the perfect piece of wood.”
The work on show in the 2004 Wynne Prize as a finalist, at the Art Gallery of NSW, titled “Driftwood Assemblage < 1” was a diptych from this series.
The other focus of my artistic activity over the past few years, is in the area of large-scale prints and paintings on canvas and paper. My exploration into prints was first initiated in 1999 and developed into my incorporating digital print technology into my work. It satisfied my concerns with advances in technology where at that point in time, I could begin to incorporate various images of assemblage installations of the found plastics.
Firstly, I developed a series of Cibachrome photographs taken from above – a birds eye view of the found plastics and then in later years, developed these into complex high-resolution large-scale high resolution works on canvas and paper, utilising contemporary photographic, computer and printing advances.
As well as embracing the digital and screen-printing arena, it also unknowingly heralded my return to painting which was my main chosen medium for many years.
The central concerns of my work are with contemporary art practice. I have for many years been working with found and recycled objects, most hand-picked by myself from somewhere along the Australian Coastline.
In fact it literally amazes me to think how many times I have bent over to pick up the many thousands of pieces of plastic debris that made up that aspect of my art, each piece jostled around for who knows how long by sand, sun and ocean, their form faded and rounded by the elements.
The unabated dumping of thousands of tonnes of plastics has been expressed in my assemblages, installations, totems, digital prints and public artworks. And yet, despite my outrage at this environmental vandalism, I returned to the beach daily to find more pieces for my artist’s palette. In an uncanny way, these plastics, as I sorted them and arranged them in my studio took on an unspeakable, indefinable and quite a magical beauty, which always fascinated me.
During the latter part of 2005 and into 2006, I created a new body of work, a series of synthetic polymer paintings on Belgian linen, based on the subject matter of plastic "purges" - plastic fabricator machine end waste. This work, considers cycles and recycling. I began re-presenting paintings of sculptures that are inherently plastic fabricator machine end waste. The use of plastic materials and their place in the evolutionary motions of recycling are important to me in constructing these images.
I made this new series of work, exploring the mechanics of how an object is put together, what place it occupies in a cycle of life; organic or man-made. My choice of materials having as much prominence as the end product has.
I see the real need for the massive social transformations that are essential, to adequately deal with such crises as the depletion of fossil fuels and climate change. I hope this work can be a timely reminder to us all of the limited supply of these petroleum based materials, which is a direct result of our current collective global mass consumerism.
This environmental artwork concentrates on cycles, momentum and the multiple. In this series of work, I painted non-recyclable purged plastic objects. These objects are by products of everything plastic, they are the plastic run before or after a hairbrush, juice bottle or chair is made. They represent everything and nothing. The plastic in its petroleum state has undergone millions of years of evolution to get to this stage. And then, it is discarded as a by-product of societal needs.
Essentially I am exploring the duality of meaning and perception and the illusion that is created in between. I am presenting an image of a non-object, in a painting of an informal Formalist sculpture. My paintings create the profile of a solid sculpture, moulded and plied to present the essence of formalism. The subject of the paintings, exhibit abstract geometrical imagery and constructivist diagramming of space that is playfully organic and blob-like.
The present direction in my environmental art work which also incorporates sculpture and assemblage, is a natural evolution for me and further consolidates my return to painting, which was my main medium for many years, prior to my working for over 8 years with found objects; making sculptures and assemblages from beach found plastic litter, which were largely based upon environmental artist themes, taking society's discarded objects of the everyday and transforming them into formal compositions.
I'm presently enjoying a re-entry into painting. After more than 10 years of collecting beach found objects and subsequently making art out of them, I’ve naturally come now to a new form of expression, which was brought on significantly as a result of my purge painting series and exploration.
Painting the Byron Bay local seascapes and landscapes, where the viewer may witness these paintings as being executed with a particular mood and sense of urgency, which is largely due to my growing concerns about global warming and feels like a natural extension of my creativity for the moment.
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