This, the first solo museum exhibition by the Sydney-based artist Stephen Birch, features sculptures and large-scale installations from the last decade of the artist's practice.
Born in Melbourne in 1961, Birch has exhibited widely throughout Australia and New Zealand over the past two decades. Often taking the form of objects drawn from everyday life, from car tyres to chandeliers to mushrooms, Birch's sculptures play with scale and context, unsettling our sense of the comfortable and familiar. Several forms recur throughout his work, drawing on mythology, art history and popular culture to create enigmatic yet humorous scenarios. Forlorn human figures, referencing anything from Spiderman to artist colleagues, and an array of trees and logs, often accompanied by deadpan video loops, appear equally caught in their own psychological dilemmas.
Created from various materials including fibreglass, papier-mâché, polyurethane and resin, Birch's sculptures call attention to their materials and methods, while at the same time drawing us in to their strange parallel worlds.