An Accidental Environmental Artist [Paperback]

The Art of John Dahlsen. Take a journey through the eyes of John Dahlsen, as he tells his story and shares his art. A leader in the
eld of environmental art throughout Australia, and in the US, Europe, and Asia. His art is considered highly collectible. An acclaimed public speaker, he has engaged audiences around the world. As an Australian environmental artist, he studied in Melbourne at the Victorian College of the Arts and did his teachers training at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education. In 2014 John lectures in Art at Charles Darwin University, where he is also doing his PhD in environmental art. He was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2014 from the Winston Churchill Foundation. John's work is reflective of this trend of environmentally responsive assemblage, situated at the intersection of works that utilize either natural or inorganic materials in their composition, and reflective of the social influence of environmental art. Sculptures using found and recycled materials, particularly materials that others would term as 'rubbish', such as plastics from drink containers, recontextualize these materials into the esthetic limelight, notably drawing attention when these works are displayed publicly, as is often the case when works are commissioned. While his work is not on the immersive scale of the Earthworks, the sheer size of the collection area for his materials is immense, and, like Smithson with the collected materials he termed 'Non-?sites', the materials link back to the environments of their collection. The action of collecting these potentially hazardous materials from various beaches and interpreting them into artworks has both the ritualistic qualities of habitual collecting, as well as the ecologically conscious remediation of actively cleaning a site. Extending this ecological aspect is the conceptual process that occurs between artwork and viewer. Reflecting elements of social-?sculpture, his sculptures, collages and installations lcÀ