Bowie Dunne: the abject, the subconscious and his art practice

Bowie Dunne is an interdisciplinary artist based in Maganjin, Brisbane. Primarily focusing on sculpture and installation works. In our chat with him, we talked about his exploration of the abject, working within two extremes, his subconscious, and how it translates into his work.

Q: Talking about your work, you often explore abject themes and concepts, could you tell me more about this?

Bowie:
There was actually a conversation that I was having with one of my really close friends recently about this subject and this fascination with things that are upsetting or striking or shocking.
I think it actually comes into how people understand beauty [and] how beauty is… there was a quote from the book that my friend was reading where they were basically talking about how the way people regard beauty as [something] terrifying when you see something that is so beautiful, there’s almost an element of terror that comes with it, like this inability to understand why this thing or this experience is so beautiful.
And I think that, that feeling of being not paralyzed, but confronted and having to understand something that is quite shocking or quite abrupt in its nature is really fascinating to me.

Q: How would you describe your art practice to someone who is new to your work?

Bowie:
I think I work in two extremes. I either plan something out meticulously [or on the] other side is just going based off like [a] texture I want to replicate, a certain shape that I want to play with.
I feel my painting is a lot more structured than my sculpture in the beginning [of the process] because I’ll plan out what I want to be on the canvas, but then as I continue with the painting, it just kind of gets more and more experimental and more realistic... less managed I reckon and then sculpture starts with a material, and then it gets more and more managed and refined over time... so working in those two different modes [is an] exploration of texture, medium, and imagery.

Q: In your exploration with the abject, your work uses a lot of contrasting colours like red and blue, almost symbolic to like emergency lights for an ambulance or police, is this a conscious choice or was it purely intuitive?

Bowie:
Yeah, not something that I’d really considered before. Either I’ve done it on purpose or it’s some sort of subconscious thing that I realized later being like, oh yeah, no, that’s what I meant that to be, or this makes sense for what I was going through at the time.
I think…the red and the blue represent the extremes of… complete control, or not being able to control anything at all. I think that conversation between those two colours is what that represents sometimes. And other times it’s just like, pure like, colour theory, it looks good together… They’re hand in hand, they work really well visually.

Connect with Bowie at
@p4rkl1fe / @sh4rkl1fe