>Ian Dawson

This is the website of the London based artist: Ian Dawson

Ian Dawson (b.1969) lives and works in London.

His artworks are fuelled by an ongoing dialogue with practitioners from other fields of material practice. His exuberant sculptures are created from 3D prints which amalgamate into colourful post-digital explosion of matter. They often appear to be in flux, as if emerging from constant material transformation which ask questions about what happens when stuff moves between states and places. What happens when an object moves from the physical world to the digital and back again. Dawson's recent sculptures, for example, use non-petroleum biomaterials which he combines with forms from mesolithic archaeology. From his core sculptural practice, he has become increasingly fascinated by the intersection between 3D printing and the digital image and his work seeks out connections between the malleability of the thermoplastics in his physical objects and a wider conversation about plasticity.
Whether it is collaborating with archaeologists, or with dispossessed communities in India and indigenous knowledge holders in Canada, Dawson's work seeks to create a dialogue between old and new forms of making. By ruminating on the past and the present his art seeks to ask how we might imagine a future which repairs the connections between different material practices and cultures. By bridging forms that have emerged through the long arc of human material culture, the mutant and hybrid sculptures that Dawson crafts dissolve accepted notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. Raising philosophical questions of the world yet unknown and of human object interactions.

Dawson has exhibited extensively with solo shows in New York (James Cohan Gallery), London (Hales and Modern Art) and Paris (Galerie Xippas) and has works in both public and private collections worldwide, including the Chaney Family collection, GossMichael Collection, and Mickey and Janice Cartin Collection. His work is featured in Contemporary British Sculpture (Schiffer Publishing) and Collage, Assembling Contemporary Art (Black Dog Publishing). He articulated the complex relationship between the artist and the creative act in his book Making Contemporary Sculpture (Crowood Press). Dawson also works to create the environments for social sculpture, and is the co-programme leader of MASS Sculpture Programme, he is co-director of The Material Lab at Winchester School of Art. Gavin Turk described his work as 'awe inspiring' in Frieze Magazine praising it for being 'exploratory, playful and having a kind of raw power'.

Ian Dawson

@demondawson

id2@soton.ac.uk

+447767634345