About
Benedict Sibley is a contemporary artist who lives and works between Melbourne and the Kinglake Ranges in Victoria, Australia. After completing a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) at RMIT University in 1991 he had a 20 year career as a furniture designer, maker and architectural joiner. During this period of activity, the focus of his work was utility, fine craftsmanship and design refinement. In 2015, a combination of personal loss and an alertness to urgent and escalating global issues led Sibley to make a return to full time visual art. After studying at the New York Studio School in 2016, the following year he commenced a Master of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).
Art is a platform that enables Sibley to engage in what he believes are the critical conversations of our time. Often representing a darker, almost Gothic interpretation of the forces that shape our lives, his works consider the perceived hostilities, fears, joys and insecurities we experience of a world undergoing upheaval of everything, everywhere and all at once. His art contains this uncertainty and the uncomfortable knowledge that we carry around in our daily lives. Sibley’s works do not attempt to impose absolutes or directives, rather they encourage consideration and wonder.
Sibley’s practice is drawing and printmaking based, informed by research, observation and photography. Since 2017, he has developed a series of works investigating personal and cultural dispossession, migration and environmental uncertainty. His upbringing in the tall Eucalypt forests of Kinglake, coupled with his firsthand experience of the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 and a 20 year interest in ecology, have all influenced his recent art production.
His drawings manifest as large-scale works on paper often composed of multiple sheets assembled as wall-size immersive images. These may be accompanied by groups of smaller independent works linked by an overall narrative. Sibley’s work operates in a similar way to a documentary-type image; being almost photographic in quality, the mediums of charcoal, ink or pigment are applied in varying densities and textures to meticulously render a detailed re-presentation of a truth that is recognisable.
Increasingly, Sibley’s time intensive drawings have led to the production of etchings. The drawing, which remains as the primary image, operates like a manuscript from which new mediations and treatments of the subject become possible. Once an etching plate is produced, identical multiples become possible. Each run of etchings is usually limited to an edition of eight impressions, upon which the plate is destroyed; accordingly, each print can be considered an original. The process of printmaking lends itself to a more democratic distribution of an image - an important consideration for Sibley is art”s accessibility.
Artist’s Statement on Fire Series 2020-2022
Australia has a history of disturbance, whether it’s colonisation, land clearing, invasive species, floods or fire. The recovery of the bush after fire can be beautiful. In Kinglake, after a massive deluge of rain, it was exciting to see water just pouring out of the mountain – like a paradise re-discovered. The scars of the fire are still apparent up there ten years later, but so is the vitality of new growth.
Between 2009 and 2019 Victoria, (in South-East Australia) experienced two ‘one in a hundred year’ bushfires in a single decade. Many ecosystems, plants and animals were destroyed or forever modified by these events. Fire has always been part of this landscape, but the increasing frequency and severity of fire suggests a full recovery is less likely in the future. Our memories are shorter than the timeline of a forest; a couple of wet years helps us ignore the underlying structural declines happening within our ecosystems.
This recent work investigates fire in the landscape, often celebrating resilience and recovery in an increasingly inhospitable world. The contemporary experience is one of accelerated change and an understanding of fire history helps to appreciate to what degree our environment is being modified by our behaviour. I am currently developing a series of reimagined fire maps in collaboration with a fire ecologist and master printmaker to further explore pressures on the landscape over time.
Artist’s Statement on Migrant Series 2020-2022
“The politicization of art mostly happens as a reaction against the aestheticization of politics practiced by political power. That was the case in the 1930s and it is the case now.”
Boris Groys, Towards a New Universalism, 2017
These drawings in this series are an investigation into recent and historical modes of migration. The images explored seek to highlight how prejudice and disinformation have interfered with how generously or receptive a prosperous society (like own own) has behaved when confronted by the misfortune of others. Initially hinging from the experiences of my refugee mother and migrant father post World War II, these works explore the last 70 years of people movement by sea, including the ongoing international refugee crisis.
The encroachment of the New Right’s anti-immigration policies challenges the contemporary worldview; the established ethical principles of our modern society. Like history repeating itself, questions are again being raised about who should be welcomed to a country like ours, and who should not. Current nationalistic and isolationist rhetoric asserts that we should be highly selective when granting citizenship. The significance of this populist pressure is that it asks us to turn our backs on those seeking asylum; individuals or communities often escaping desperate circumstances including persecution, war and famine. This closing-of-borders position is in stark contrast to the more open policy exhibited to previous generations of migrants, and represents a dramatic shift in global sentiment. It could indeed be argued that this moral regression is part of a general decline in the fulfilment of international responsibilities by first world nations like the US, Italy, Hungary and Australia amongst others.
Why is it so contentious for a country as wealthy as our own to direct the appropriate compassion, resources and energy towards meeting the humanitarian needs of others, let alone address our environmental obligations? How did we allow a culture of fear and doubt to hijack intelligent discourse and prohibit our ability to help and engage with others? How do we re-set our moral compass so we can recover the idea of a nation, a world, that welcomes the richness and well-being that cultural diversity brings, to foster the possibility of a sustainable transnational future?