Lincoln Austin
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 skilfully 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.
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