Alan Constable - Recent Work

Alan Constable’s enduring fascination with the camera began when he was 8 years old. Modelled as a child from cardboard, cut paper and glue, he has developed his aesthetic into working with clay.

Legally blind, these works are created with his hands and his heart. The poetic renaissance of a timeless tradition, they are an intimate and intuitive response to a world he knows but cannot see.

Engaged in an act of mimetic representation, Constable delights in the immediacy of process. With extraordinary curiosity, he examines, traces and commits to memory the structure of the referent camera, accentuating its scale and form. Pinched, pushed, pummelled and smoothed, these cameras bear the markings of history and imprint of Constable’s touch, impressing upon us the sense experience of clay.

The act of photography renders possible a command of the absent – a moment captured and frozen in time. Constable’s palpable vision reaches out beyond the recording function of the camera to expose beauty in the truth of material and form. With expressive power, he pursues a new grammar of seeing. His cameras disclose to us an inflection on how to look, and what is worth looking at. Their arresting presence demands our exalted attention as we are invited to enter his enigmatic and revelatory world.

For accessibility information please contact Darren Knight gallery on (02) 9699 5353