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While John’s art practice changes and evolves, his underlying commitment, as an artist has never wavered. He has always been motivated by a professional duty to be aware of and express current social, spiritual and environmental concerns through his art practice.
The central concerns of his work are with contemporary art practice. He has for many years been working with found and recycled objects, most hand-picked from somewhere along the Australian Coastline.
“The unabated dumping of thousands of tons of plastics has been expressed in my assemblages, installations, totems, digital prints and public artworks.
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For over ten years Dahlsen has been creating his environmental assemblage art and has garnered much recognition. He holds regular solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, Europe and the United States.
In 2000, he won the prestigious Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW and was selected to be a cultural ambassador and represent Australia at the Athens Olympics of the Visual Arts “Artiade” Exhibition 2004.
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Since then I’ve actually discovered that it’s right around the whole coast of Australia. These plastics are all around the coast, and it’s fairly identical all the way around the coast and it’s not only in Australia but its right around the globe.
It’s just a real contemporary phenomenon that has happened, this ocean litter that is floating around and they’ve made plastics that are lightweight and they do float around and they end up on the beaches across the globe. At that time, I picked up all of the plastics.
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His paintings are constructed with over-laying images that veil the original marks and are as complex as our lives. The titles reflect the nature of the works: totemic and symbolic (read Hieroglyphic).
Dahlsen approaches these works in the same manner as his assemblages by placing each series of marks in a construction that adds new meaning to each layer. Each mark is purposeful. Each layer has meaning.
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This piece will act as a celebration of roads and the city infrastructures. Historically, public art has been employed to soften the ‘blow’ of a city’s infrastructure and the predominance of tough and durable structures and the masculine elements of engineering.
The intention, as I see it, of this totemic structure is not to try and soften any image of roads and traffic, but to bring it to an artistic conclusion, where the artwork meets the challenges of its surroundings, reinterpreting it and not trying to digress from the very nature of roads, traffic and engineering with a contrasting message.
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My aim is that this piece will create a sense of community ownership, whether amused, grateful bewildered or confronted, most will appreciate that the towns engineers and planners have made a serious effort, to install artwork between a major thoroughfare and an inner city community.
Similarly I am sure the local community will appreciate the artwork as its own by the very nature of its proximity to it and relate to its artistic and environmental message.
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The other work which I would like to discuss as a favourite project, which I believe really runs in parallel to the Absolut commission, is the Guardian commission.
This particular work was in response to a brief from the brilliant Brisbane City Council, who decided that a public artwork would be appropriate for the entrance to Kangaroo point which is a small suburb in inner-city Brisbane which was to receive a new traffic intersection and entrance without the traffic lights that had slowed down this particular entrance for a number of years.
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“The real beauty of the found object work that I create, especially when I use thongs, is that most people who view it have owned a pair, will enthusiastically scan this sculpture with the romantic and genuine notion that somewhere is an old pair of their thongs that they lost on the beach!
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In terms of an individual project I would most likely look towards a larger one or ones. My favourite project in this regard is the ‘Absolut Dahlsen’ commission. I would have to rate this alongside the Guardian project as the two most favourite projects. There are a number of reasons why I come to this statement.
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John Dahlsen’s work provides a vivid illustration of the way Australians view the temporary nature of materials and the effect their behaviour has on the environment. Culturally Australians tend to see themselves as beach lovers, yet continue to waste and discard into the seas and waterways, this harks to the central theme in Ecologic, that actions we take have an effect.
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I continue to make works made from recycled materials including works from driftwood. I see the whole field is being wide open for me in my chosen material whatever that is. Mostly I work with recycled materials because I find them tremendously satisfying to work with, I love the look of most recycled materials.
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I have been commissioned to make some large public artworks from recycled materials. The first of these was a brief from the Brisbane City Council. The brief was to use leftover roadside materials and make a public art sculpture as an entrance to one of its prominent suburbs, following a substantial realignment of the traffic entry to this suburb.
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Recycled materials for me, have been a great source of inspiration. I keep seeing various possibilities as to how I can use recycled materials in my artworks all the time. It never ceases to amaze me how many ways that we can recycle and it’s really a great thing that recycling has become so topical nowadays.
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My personal philosophy on recycled materials has come about largely through artistic accidents upon my part. When I say this, I mean to simply refer to my own experience and story about how I began to work with recycled materials in my own art.
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You said as a child it was quite natural for you to go to the tip and to assemble something new from discarded objects. Do you think society, as a whole is less likely to do that now? Rather than repair and reuse things, we’re more inclined to just buy a new one?
Since the 50’s there’s been a new phenomenon. We’ve never been faced with this before. Things are instant.
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Do you think there’s something inherently political about using recycled materials?
I think naturally there are some inherent messages in using these sorts of materials. It depends how you do it. I’ve been very cautious about using materials in a way that for me, is honest. My intention is to make something beautiful out of these objects.
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Do you identify yourself as an environmental artist?
I’ve used the term environmental art. I’ve been coined an environmental artist. I want people to understand that the work has strong environmental themes in case they miss that. It’s not likely that they will, but just in case they have certain ignorance about the materials – just to make sure it brings to their attention the environmental issues. I don’t have a problem with the term ‘environmental artist’ or the notion of being part of an environmental movement.
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Do you believe that raising awareness necessarily leads to an action? Can you see the impact of your work creating a shift in consciousness?
Absolutely. I receive telephone calls and emails from people week in week out.
I’m constantly receiving enquiries from people – particularly in the United States and also in Europe. These are people using the information I provide on my website for their studies, writing about my work in their theses, newspapers or magazines and the general questioning is along the lines of what you’re asking here.
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What role do you think art plays in prompting public dialogue about all those things?
I think art can play a significant role in this kind of dialogue. Art really has a place to be an informer. All the way through history, artists have been at the forefront of responding to contemporary issues in society and being a bit like beacons for the general public, for society at large.
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Is there any environmental issue in particular that concerns you?
I think I have a very generalised view of what’s going on with the environment at the moment and I guess that has political ramifications as well. I, like most of the people on the planet – unless they’re particularly blind, just see that the planet is in acute ecological crisis at the moment and we as a human race could be going either way with this. It may be just way too late to save this fragile ecology we’ve got.
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