David Austen: Objects and Images from the Edge of the World
19 May –15 July 2001
Wolsey Art Gallery

This exhibition presented the work of David Austen and his selection of Ethnographical and Natural Sciences exhibits from Ipswich Museums Collection.

In Austen’s personal selection the common theme was “on the edge” whether it be of time, space, culture, or geographical area. Memories, journeys and notions of evolution and extinction were explored. The exhibition also contained material from Austen’s own collection of books and items gathered from travels; images from a childhood in Canada, black and white photographs taken in pre-revolution Zanzibar and a copy of Life Magazine covering the first manned moon landing.

For this exhibition, his own work included large abstract and text based paintings and dark charcoal drawings of twisted roots and branches. Alongside earlier works on paper were recent intensely coloured gouaches, botanical drawings and his delicate intimate watercolour studies of the human figure.

Beautiful and thought provoking, objects brought together included a sample of early rare barkcloth from Polynesia, masks from the North West Coast of America, a model ship made of cloves, fragile skeletons of Monkey and Boa Constrictor, and a bisected elephant skull once belonging to the Reverend Henslow, Darwin’s tutor at Cambridge. The exhibits ranged in size and scale from an electroplated fly inside a tiny bell jar to the vertebrae of a whale washed up in Harwich Harbour in 1816.

Not unfamiliar with working with museum collections, Austen was included in
the exhibition Antechamber at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1997 in which he displayed objects from the Egyptian Antiquities Department of the British Museum. In his exhibition in 1998 he responded to the environment of Inverleith House, Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh.

David Austen was born in 1960 in Harlow, Essex. He lives and works in London.

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