Sebastian Di Mauro

Sebastian Di Mauro is a Senior Lecturer at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Since 1987 he has held over 35 solo exhibitions. His work has been included in excess of 90 group exhibitions and has been exhibited in Australia, Europe and Asia. His work encompasses a wide range of art forms including sculpture, installation, public art, painting, and artist books. Materials as diverse as pot scourers, carpet underlay and artificial grass play a critical role in conveying his intended connotations. Residencies include Parks Victoria, British School at Rome (Australia Council) and Asia Link residency/exhibition Enjoin in Manila. In September 1998, Between Material, a monograph of his artwork, was launched. He was awarded a 'New Work' grant in 1999 from the Australia Council to develop an installation of sculpture for the Museum of Brisbane in 2000. His artwork has been selected for a number of major sculpture awards including National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition, National Gallery of Australia, Canbera 2001; the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award and Exhibition, Victoria 2003 and 2005; and The McClelland Survey and Award 2003, McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin, Victoria. His first public art commission was completed for 175 Eagle Street, Brisbane in 2002. He has also undertaken the largest single public art commission for 33 Charlotte Street, Brisbane to date, and created an artwork for the Brisbane Magistrates Court, Queensland. He has collaborated with architect Alice Hampson on several public art projects. The most recent for the Logan Community Health Centre.

Exhibitions

Scuta - 2010

On encountering the Scuta series one is immediately struck by bursts of colour radiating from a universe of artificial suns. They appear as balls of fire and light, formed of flames that lick at the viewer trying to set them ablaze and then race ever onwards. They are formed of neoprene, and also recall coral or fantastical marine creatures from the Great Barrier Reef; alternatively they read as surfboards with which to harness the movements of the sea. More notably however, these new forms tie together Di Mauro's continued used of fire as a symbol of transformation. Like most of Di Mauro's work, these sculptures are also imbued with the artist's Italian/Australian heritage. In many ways they are quintessentially Australian - their hues recall the beating hot sun of central Australia and the tropical climate of North Queensland where the artist grew up, yet the potential energy of fire speaks of his family home town at the base of Mt Etna - both environments irrevocably altered by the power of flames. Transformative power is further explored in Di Mauro's newest series, the Cirrus Suite. These cast aluminium forms with their high gloss chameleon finish are simultaneously animal, plant and alchemical metals.

Evergreen - 2008

Evergreen is the dream. This promise of bounty and perpetual youthful blush finds materialisation in this group of new sculptures by Sebastian Di Maruo. These are sensuous shapes extruded from the imagination, facets formed not by a glancing blow upon an anvil or the forging of hot metal within a mould, but by the softness of the way light catches the direction of the green pile. For these surfaces are covered by a humble material and so continue Di Mauro's investigation with the use of one of the more maligned products of post war industrial chemical ingenuity - synthetic grass - generically known as astro turf. Designed in the early 1960s in good faith to fulfil a need for reliable sporting surfaces, it belongs to that generation of materials that sought to give the appearance of natural products and yet alter them to allow them to do new things, be cheaper to manufacture or easier to manipulate. We had nylon for silk, laminate for wood grain, acrylic for wool and a host of plastics for rubber. Our changing responses to these products can be seen as a litmus for how we relate to the " real world". Wonder and fascination at what science could invent was followed by a slight distaste for the perceived cheaper qualities of these new materials and the fact that they tried to conceal their true identity. We now have an awareness that such equations of material, manufacture and use are not simple and that each decision and each object has an environmental and social impact. Astro turf has recently unwittingly acquired an additional negative moniker. Astroturfing describes the practice by corporations or political interests of falsely setting up on-line community or interest groups to make them appear as though they are true 'grass roots' organizations. The problem of authenticity on the internet has allowed such voices to gain a currency they would not otherwise have had. In an ironic way Di Mauros works reclaim the qualities of the material for Australia, the driest continent. Synthetic grass offers all the performance capabilities of the real thing and yet none of the labour or water use issues. It allows us to indulge in a year round fantasy of a lush European style manicured garden potentially becoming the only garden you will ever need. In so doing, these works continue the themes addressed by di Mauros major sculpture for the 2008 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, Folly (Themeda triandra syn.T.australis ) . Although prominently sited, that work was intended to be positioned near one of the few stands of native trees in the Werribee Park gardens to make poignant comment on the colonial reordering of the native landscape. These new sculptures also reference the tradition of topiary, but rather than appear as tortured nature - cut and trimmed in the shape of spheres, twists or cones to reflect the precision of an over ordered mind - these new forms allow for possibilities, their extremities push and probe in unexpected ways. When they meet, silent conversations begin between their formal languages of shape and form. That dialogue is extended to the viewer who may choose to position the sculptures in different ways, and so create a new paradox of the evergreen to become ever changing. Virginia Rigney

Sebastian Di Mauro - Pastoral installation

Sebastian Di Mauro - Arboreal installation

Sebastian Di Mauro - Seer and Herbaceous

Sebastian Di Mauro - Evergreen installation

Helen Lempriere Award - 2008

Colonizers replicate aspects from the mother country in their newly discovered Arcadia, a yearning to recreate the know into the unknown. This was no exception for the British who colonized Australia. There was a strong desire to imitate what they had left behind and to ignore the idiosyncratic aspects of the newly discovered country in which they had begun a new life. Grand homes, lush green landscapes and intensive framing shaped much of Australia where the rainfall is low and there is an authentic flora and fauna.

Float - 2006

In Sebastian Di Mauro's sculptures the physical world constitutes an optic through which the aesthetic foundations of our particular humanity can be approached. His work has always been minutely attentive to the ways our humanity is bound up with both the fabrication of the world and its poetic mystification. Through its concern with ritual and habitual acts and interactions with things, and in its insistent use of everyday materials - themselves replete with everyday experiences, with quotidian humanity - materials themselves become things, objects, demanding touch, articulating tactility. Di Mauro's interest in the significance of things further takes the form of an engagement with the overlaps that might be forged and the distinctions that might be made between domestic and industrial objects and practices, and the ways they constitute the reach and limits of our human world. In its elaboration of the worlds of work and rest, Di Mauro's sculptural practice explores the dynamics of warmth, of proximity and tactility. Returning us to the domain of the object, even to the thing itself, his sculptural installations have sketched lines of continuity between substances and materials that are on the one hand archaic and elemental - felt, oil, lead, sugar - and on the other resolutely modern, contingent, artificial - carpet underlay and astroturf. These lines are drawn through the each specific work's particular invocation of our measured and profligate use of materials, and in the process they come to bespeak our vast experience of them; in broad terms they express our utter familiarity with things. Refashioned into new forms the materials remind us of their particular aesthetics, they break us out of our habitual engagements and connect us anew to the world of objects. The material utilised in Float draws on these conceptual threads and returns us to Di Mauro's constant preoccupation with the nature of culture, to the tensions and overlaps between what is highly wrought, artificial and what we barely notice in the familiar world around us. Neoprene is both a lifestyle material - most commonly seen in wet suits - and a piece of science, a miracle technology. Developed last century by the inventor of nylon as an oil-resistant alternative to natural rubber, neoprene is a complex polymer formed in the modernist crucibles of chemistry and industrial demand. Boasting qualities of resistance, robustness, flexibility and versatility of application (from liquid to solid forms, from wetsuits to electrical insulation and car fan belts), it insulates, seals and resists noise, corrosion and extremes of temperature. In this way its compliance and ubiquity articulate modernity's promise of a secure and protected environment, safe from the elements while at the same time reminding us of our technological dexterity, our skills in refashioning the world according to our needs. In daily life neoprene ties us to things while protecting us from them. In its most familiar use in wetsuits it indulges and extends our coastal fantasy of aquatic liberation, casting us adrift into the elements. Drawing on the technological comforts of modern materials that are safely suburban and yet astonishingly space-age, neoprene makes other ways of life possible and keeps us afloat. Like Di Mauro's early work that fashioned banal everyday substances into new forms and uses, neoprene carries a particular history of familiarity, but reminds us at the same time that even everyday materials have fantastical properties that draw us out, away from the coast. To make the works the neoprene is machine-cut into precise lengths, which are then threaded or hooked painstakingly through a gridded mesh in a practice reminiscent of cottage industry in its labour-intensive and repetitive nature. The multiplicity of the finished work - the tiny cityscapes, the tentacles, the uneven pile - bears witness to the time of its careful, meditative construction, recalling the obsessive making-do aesthetic of rag rugs or quilts. The visible construction alerts us further to the ways each sculpture layers another, earlier level of work in the fabrication of neoprene itself. Like other functional base materials - from rope to linoleum to vinyl - neoprene bears its own history, the story of its fabrication, functions and applications. As a highly technological material, neoprene's construction narrative happens at a chemical, a molecular level, and as such signals both artifice and magic, the making of new substances. Float's forms recall Di Mauro's earlier hybrid objects - organic, touching forms composed of industrial materials tucked and folded, pressed into service. Once again in Float we have a series of objects that seem familiar both in their components and their forms, their intimate crossings of nature and culture. The bounded humility of the soft dome shapes combines with the gridded core of their construction and with neoprene's always surprising blue/black iridescence, and in the process the putative contradiction of nature and culture - the apparent terms of this aesthetic dialogue - are transformed, with culture now seen to be yearning for nature, aspiring to its forms and abstract principles, the shelter of its domes, the softness of its tentacles. Looking more closely - trying not to touch - we note a further geometry in the square cut edges of each strip, a precision that belies the squashy softness of neoprene, which, when squeezed, we remember, seems to be full of water, a substance somewhere in between sponge and kelp. This jagged kind of boundary between hard and soft, animate and machine-made is marked insistently in the works, drawing us to a sense of the edges of things, to the hard-edged geometry that marks the crash and tessellation of cliffs, the point where the land breaks down into the sea. This is the terrain of division and limits, as well as of the rock pool with its shifting but contained familiarity, and as such takes us back to Di Mauro's reiterated articulation of the impossible boundaries of home and factory, of work and play, and the aesthetic investments we have in their imbrication. Brigitta Olubas University of New South Wales

Helen Lempriere Award 2005 - 2005

Blast.gwb.jh offers a whimsical thwarting of traditional notions of sculpture, eschewing traditional material in favour of contemporary fabrics. Astroturf has been used and offers a dialogue between the real and the artificial, and extends the nature culture debate. My work alludes to the ritualistic Australian pastime of mowing the lawn, as well as to the traditional European art of topiary despite ecological arguments for the creation of native environments in our urban backyards. The shape is anthropomorphic and organic it bears a resemblance to a large green phallus and a rocket. The title is reminiscent of a website address, a reference to the 'dot.com' culture that has become a significant part of contemporary life. However it is a pun and deliberately furtive comment about the current political climate. More specifically it refers to the close diplomatic relationship between Australia and the United States and our involvement in Iraq as suggested by the initials of the country leaders. Blast.gwb.jh takes on the character of a weapon, nonetheless a benign perhaps impotent missile. It reflects the folly of war 'big boys playing with big boys' toys'.

Suburban Abstractions - 2004

SUBURBAN ABSTRACTIONS ROOTS Sebastian Di Mauro speaks of his recent geometric assemblages as reflections on the surrounding rituals and reality of Australian suburban garden lawns. This indicates, to me, the associative power of abstraction - a force to be celebrated - as I find the works imbued with other, differing and multiple references that dynamically jostle for attention. On record as a frequent recent user of Astroturf in recent years, Di Mauro's favoured material (he prefers Wimbledon Unreal Grass), positions his sculptures within the dualities of a 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' character. On the one hand gloriously reflecting its synthetic composition, the bright olive polyurethane pile remains rooted in its purpose as an aesthetic and functional model of grass, a replica of, and replacement for, the real thing. Di Mauro's sculptural practice is the product of a critical philosophy, productively reflecting the tensions between contemporary matter and ideas. His works provoke speculation on scientific and social developments within the biological and chemical worlds. In their precise and equally-sized rectangular components, the Suburban Abstractions are his most geometric sculptures. Hence, the inflections of mathematical as well as regulated, constructed life with which they are imbued. Equating suburbia with ordered plots and lawns, Di Mauro signals the evolving state of our grass roots, both future and past. In evoking mown grass and its associated sensory pleasures or the aesthetic pattern of the cut lawn and the weekend family rituals or childhood sites of play, these building blocks of suburbia can reflect the changing experiences of lived space. For every new outer metropolitan housing development, promoted on the basis of space, fresh air and security are multiple urban apartment blocks pitched to offer garden-free, low maintenance, high density environments. For anyone with a desire to avoid gardening while having green lawns year round, Astrolawn, Real Turf, Evergreen, 1st Turf, Novagrass, Green Tech and many companies like them can make your dream come true. Technology supplies lawn for all styles; faux grass in an attractive green with a soft feel to blend with the neighbors garden or the more refined and luxurious looks that come at a higher price. Where reputations must be earned, try Tuff Turf, guaranteed to withstand backyard football and rioting children and pets. While synthetic lawn gains increasing credibility and a contemporary relevance in locations like Australia where water scarcity is intensifying, the material itself is not a recent innovation. Its primary application has been in sports fields, where it offers a consistent surface in all weathers and uses compared to grass. There are side effects, such as the very qualities of toughness and resilience that are a factor in sporting injuries, leading to further research to develop the "improved, better-than-ever" product. Perfect grass: No mowing! No Fading! No Fertilizers! No Pesticides! Coming soon: homeowner water tax credits! In our capability to replace and 'improve' on nature, a Soylent Green tenor surfaces within Suburban Abstractions. The grim, out of control, slippage of humankind and cities into a future dystopia, where water, food and accommodation are rarities, is contrasted in this 1973 film with the now-extinct natural beauty of the earth and its wildlife. Ultimately, reliant on synthetic food and driven to a loss of morals and ethics, society falls into a fatal, nightmare scenario. The film and 'artificial grass' share a similar temporality, synthetic grass arriving on the domestic market in the early 1970s. There is another, longer term potential within Suburban Abstractions to operate across the binary of utopian/dystopian effects, residing in the nature of geometric abstraction. The potential for creating meanings, in both the multifarious forms and possible contents of geometric abstraction, has its roots in the arrival of modernism, and new understandings of human existence in freshly industralised, urban western cities.1 Unlike many aspects of the modern, abstraction in visual art, potentially due to its schematic nature, continues after the close of modernism to hold potential for the contemplation of being; natural and unnatural, perfect and imperfect, empirical and intuitive. Today, we realise there can be no unspoilt nature, no place that has not been exposed to the effects of humanity, no organic or biological form that exists unaltered in post-industrial society. Abstraction also is not pure, but its history and perversion has become an integral part of its meaning, and its contemporary attraction. In Australia, we have also entered a time when not everyone will desire or achieve a front yard or mow the nature strip or experience cut grass. Surroundings cannot be taken for granted; adaptation, change, replacement, evolution are all unstoppable in biological realms, in the nature residing in the green spaces in cities and suburbs, and in the world we experience. Just look how many years synthetic grass is guaranteed for 'no fade' now! Zara Stanhope 1. It was at the moment of the development of synthetic grass in the late 1960s that American artist Dan Graham was photographing the minimal-type forms and structures he recognised in his local suburban landscape, to indicate the subjective nature of minimalism and its social relevance.

Sebastian Di Mauro - Suburban Abstractions 1

Sebastian Di Mauro - Suburban Abstractions 2

Sebastian Di Mauro - Suburban Abstractions 3

Turf Sweet - 2003

This body of small sculptures are a further development from a recent body of large sculptures produced by Sebastian Di Mauro collectively titled Floccus. Turf Sweet examines the relationship between human beings and nature extending Di Mauro's exploration of sculpture as a contemporary medium with considerable possibilities. More specifically, Turf Sweet investigates what the artist describes as the inherent 'irrepressible human desire' to replicate and improve on that which is found in nature, a theme that emerges as central to Di Mauro's ongoing practice. As with Clip Di Mauro has once again used synthetic grass to 'coat' the underlying galvanised steel structure forming a skin of sorts over the skeleton. The fake 'grass' offers a dialogue between the real and the artificial, and extends the nature/culture debate, which remains central to much contemporary art production. The sculptures that make up Turf Sweet wittily allude to the ritualistic Australian weekend pastime of mowing the lawn, as well as to the traditional European art of topiary, which has been embraced by many Australian suburban gardeners in the pursuit of a manicured, formal garden. They are imbued with a humour influenced by an ironic Australian attitude that encapsulates the culture's characteristically self-deprecating attitude, at the same time raising questions to do with some of the more curious, inexplicable realities of contemporary life. Di Mauro says "I like the idea that the sculptures from Turf Sweet may be the perfect solution for someone living in a small apartment with no space, who wish to have a garden with sculpture". In this sense, Turf Sweet offers a whimsical thwarting of traditional notions of sculpture, eschewing traditional materials in favour of contemporary fabrics. Di Mauro's work most often relates to everyday life, and much of his work includes the use of ready-made objects, household and commercial products. Di Mauro explains "For me art needs to directly relate to everyday life. Turf Sweet aims to transport the viewer beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary." His collective practice explores an interest in the transformation of ordinary objects into something poetic and metaphoric.

McClelland Sculpture Award - 2003

National Sculpture Award - 2003

Helen Lempriere Award 2003 - 2002

past the boundary waters is a development from a body of work that investigates the metaphysical. I am interested in the materiality of the everyday, the textures of the worlds around us, the ways these worlds shift; from work to play, from home to home, across the borders - the stories of our lives. Cycles of death, decay and regeneration are played out across the nature/culture divide. The juxtaposition of text and simple shapes is layered with meanings and narratives, drawing our attention to our constant state of flux and the journey we have embarked on, by offering a glimps of the big picture through words and personal imagery.

Sebastian Di Mauro - past the boundary waters

This site requires Flash 9. If you are seeing this, you'll need to update your player before entering.
Click here to update.