Buildings at Casey Base, Antarctica
2000, oilstick, varnish, salvaged wood
Lovely Massive Uncompassionate
2000, acrylic, oilstick, jute, 91 x 91cm
Personal Void Impact
2000, acrylic, oilstick, jute, 91 x 91cm
Ms Chemical and Mr Smog Get Married
1997, ink on tarpaulin, 146 x 146cm
Wilkes Land
2000, acrylic, jute, 40 x 40cm each x 21 images
Biography and Qualifications
Born Melbourne, 1960
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, 1981
Description of Work
I don't have a home. This is odd and almost illegal in the modern world. Not having a home makes me constantly intransit. I suck up visas, kilometres and vistas like a hungry leech in a bloodbath. This lifestyle that I chose twenty years ago seems like a pathetic disease, or on a good day, a constructive kind of travelsickness. My particular symptoms include: confusing domestic with exotic, thinking airports are cosy, becoming automatically diplomatic in any situation, finding loneliness fun, solitude is desired, bowel problems are normal, borders and mis-communication seem like homely topics and naturally homesickness is cured. Like many diseases this tumbleweed fever overrides all else. I often wonder if I did have a home, would I be able to stay there for longer than a few months without this sickness arriving on my doorstep and arranging my departure.
Foreign is now very familiar to me. I wallow in foreignness like a fat water-buffalo in mud, moving from one wallow hole in Phnom Penh to another in Paris and then onto Perth. Everysomewherever seems better than stasis. I am pleasantly lost and at ease with my form of melding life, art and travel together. Sometimes this wanderlust feels like a bizarre non-stop stopover or a strange habitual dislocation, but thankfully there are the occasional comfortable pillows to ease my travails.
Stephen Eastaugh, Beijing, 2002
Awards/Exhibitions
Eastaugh has held around thirty-one solo exhibitions since 1987, with galleries in Australia, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Thailand, Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands. Other residencies, awards and exhibitions include:
Collections
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Australian Antarctic Division Collection; Gold Coast City Gallery, Gold Coast, Queensland; City of Hamilton Art Gallery, Hamilton, Victoria; Artbank, Sydney; Faber Castell Collection, Sydney
Selected bibliography
CARROLL, Alison, Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition, Moët & Chandon Foundation, Australia, 1992
CRAWFORD, Ashley, "Altered states", World Art, volume 17, April 1998, pp 45-9
GRISHIN, Sasha, "European visions of the other", Art Monthly, number 96, December 1996, pp 27-8
LINDSAY, R, The Baillieu Myer Collection of the 80s, ex cat, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1994
WARDELL, Michael, "East(augh), West, North & South", Stephen Eastaugh: Antarctica, ex cat, 2000