Lionel Bawden is an Australian artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and painting. Bawden’s core practice exploits hexagonal coloured pencils as a sculptural material, reconfigured and carved into amorphous shapes, mining the material’s rich qualities of colour, geometry and metaphor. Bawden explores themes of flux, transformation and repetition as preconditions to our experience of the physical world, essential to the construction of identity. Bawden’s sculptural works harness landscape as a stand-in for the body, personal themes of desire, longing and interconnection become abstracted in a generative process to create form. Bawden’s recent paintings explore darker psychological states, grounded in an exploration of an ambivalent relationship between figure and landscape. These paintings mark a return to the figure after a sustained fascination with more oblique approaches to articulating aspects of the human condition.
Lionel Bawden completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours in the painting department at The Australian National University, Canberra School of Art in 1997. During 1995 Bawden spent six months at The China National Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou, China. Bawden was recipient of the 2009 Art Omi International Artist Residency, New York, USA, (through Art Omi Australia committee) and the 2003 Creative New Zealand residency at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, creating the exhibition ‘the spring tune’. In 2005 Bawden shared a 3-month Red Gate Gallery artist residency, Beijing with Sydney artist Nell. Bawden was the recipient of the 2009 Wynne Prize, through the Art Gallery of NSW and the 2004 ABN Amro emerging Artist Award, Sydney.
