CHRIS DOLMAN
’THIS WON’T LAST’
2 – 31 OCTOBER, 2025
Thursday 2 October: Exhibition Launch
Thursday 23 October: Echoes (Twilight)
Wednesday 29 October: In Conversation with Chris Dolman
Chris Dolman, This won’t last, 2025, studio image. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST STATEMENT
This won’t last is an installation that takes on ideas of the contemporary ruin to explore impermanence, disembodiment, failure, and decay.
The exhibition in a broad sense is a response to questions I have pondered lately;
Can a ruin ever be complete, or is its essence always in the process of becoming? Do ideas shape the world more through their clarity or their ambiguity? Is a ruin a mask, or a memory unravelling?
Through hand building and sandcasting, layered monoprints and soundscapes, disguised office furniture, field recordings, and videos on phones, the work draws on fragments of personal history, speaks to the artist studio as a site of ruin, and speculates on a collective dystopic future that is quickly closing in.
ARTIST BIO
Chris Dolman is a cross disciplinary artist and teacher living and working on Gadigal land.
Using traditional techniques with ad-hoc methodologies, Dolman explores contradictions within himself and the world around him. He uses chance and intuition as drivers for making, humour to disguise meaning, and switches between abstract and figurative modes of representation, to talk about existential themes of loss and impermanence, expectation and failure.
Dolman holds an MFA (research) from Sydney College of Arts, Sydney University, 2018, and a BFA printmaking with honours (first class) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2010.
In 2019, he won the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Traveling Scholarship. He received the Dyason Bequest from the Art Gallery of NSW in 2017. ArtStart and New Work grants from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2013 and 2011. He was the recipient of the Wallara Travelling Scholarship, George Hicks award, and the NGV Women’s Association Award, VCA 2009.
Dolman has undertaken international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Villa Belleville, Paris, and Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium. National residencies include: Bundanon Trust, Hill End, BigCi NSW, Ceramic Design Studio, Parramatta Artist Studios, and Artspace Sydney.