stephen eastaugh with artwork

stephen eastaugh

Stephen Eastaugh was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1960 and, explicably, has two fathers. Both were sailors and – both – were either the cause or inspiration for Eastaugh's self-diagnosed disease: an unremitting, uncontrollable and incurable need to travel. In the guise of artist-as-raconteur, traveler-as-artist and lost-confused-and-fuzzy, Eastaugh's book Unstill Life explores three decades of travel and art on the road and was written at Mawson Base during the Antarctic winter of 2009 while undertaking his third stint on an Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship courtesy of the Australian Antarctic Division. He currently moves between Australia, Argentina and... elsewhere.

 

"A Good Day Tonight displays a selection of work created at Mawson station in East Antarctica when I was the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellow during the year 2009. I spent 11 months in Antarctica that year which is a fair amount of time to spend in a location that is extremely isolated and not your normal residency for an artist. Brutal lethal beauty, strange green lights in the sky and Sunday strolls on blue ice all eventually became normality. To absorb the brutality as well as the beauty around Mawson was somewhat tricky as was translating all my experiences down on the Ice into art without being overly romantic, stupidly agog or just confused by the scale and light or lack of light. Antarctica really is the beauty and the beast of landscapes so I tried to get to know both these elements.

The series A Good Day Tonight came out of the winter period when time became fluid one day and froze over the next. I explored this temporal disruption and the 'heart of darkness' with the grid in the form of calendars each made up of 49 tiny dark tones. I actually turned 49 in July of that winter and I recall that being a rather fluid celebration"

Stephen Eastaugh 2010