Alan Constable

Alan Constable (born 1956) is an Australian artist well known for his ceramic sculptural depictions of photographic cameras. Constable has worked principally from his Northcote-based studio at Arts Project Australia since 1991, gaining critical success as a multi-disciplinary artist proficient in a wide diversity of media including pastel, gouache, paint and ceramics. He has been working on his series of ceramic cameras since 2007 and works from this series were represented at the 2009 Australian Ceramic Triennale in Sydney and featured in a solo exhibition of his work, Clay Cameras, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. Thirteen works from this series were acquired for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014, and appeared in their blockbuster exhibition of contemporary art, Melbourne Now, in the same year.

Constable was born in Melbourne. His “fascination with light and love of cameras” began at the age of eight, when he would construct intricate replicas of cameras, made from cereal cartons and glue. As artist Peter Atkins states, this early “interest in cameras – objects that are totally reliant on vision to find, frame and capture an image – is not without irony,” due to the fact that Constable is both legally blind and deaf. He participated in his first group exhibition in 1987 at St Martin’s Theatre Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne and shortly thereafter he began regularly working at Arts Project Australia (APA), an organisation devoted to supporting and promoting artists with an intellectual disability. Although Constable received no formal training, his participation in the studio program at APA gave him access to fine art materials and the informal tuition provided by the practicing artists employed by the organisation. Following the commencement of his work at APA he began exhibiting regularly in Australia and participated in his first international group exhibitions in 1995, in the USA and Belgium.

Both Constable’s lack of formal training and disability has identified him as one of the key figures within the Outsider Art category in Australia. This categorisation is confirmed by his repeated inclusion in Outsider Art exhibitions and fairs, both in Australia and in the USA [see Exhibitions]. However, in recent years his work has also achieved critical success in the wider sphere of the Australian contemporary art institution and his first solo exhibition occurred at Helen Gory Galerie, a commercial art gallery located in Melbourne, in 2009. This exhibition was quickly followed by his inclusion in the Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014, a solo exhibition in Los Angeles curated by the artist Ricky Swallow in 2013 and his inclusion an exhibition curated by the Museum of Everything at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam, in 2016.

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