PAUL SLOAN

Artist Biography

b. 1970, Belfast. 

Paul Sloan was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and immigrated to South Australia in the early 1970s. After working as a Photographer's Assistant and a Musician, Sloan went on to study Fine Arts. He holds a Bachelor of FineArts (Hons) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). 

Based in Adelaide, South Australia, he has been the recipient of a number of prestigious grants. Most recently Sloan has undertaken residencies in Helsinki, Finland and Beijing, China. 

In 2014 Sloan undertook a three-month Australia Council for the Arts residency at HIAP on Suomenlinna Island, a UNESCO world heritage site off the coast of Helsinki. In 2015 he undertook a month-long residency in Beijing, at the Red Gate Gallery. 

Paul Sloan exhibits both nationally and internationally and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. 

Artist Statement

Paul Sloan has an interdisciplinary practice and works across a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and sound-based performances. While he draws on multiple landscapes – sonic,socio-political, cultural, historical, colonial – for inspiration, his work focuses on the themes of revolution, rebellion and the related flux that lies within.

Sloan is interested in examining that which often escapes our attention, in presenting oblique signifiers, and points of transformation. Through the assembly of seemingly disparate and unconnected images viewers are required to construct their own ordering narrative(s). Images are thrown up –as if from the collective subconscious of our visually saturated epoch – devoid of hierarchy, yet laced with arguments, loaded with questions.

“The same themes seem to resurface again and again within my practice, yet each time a new facetor aspect presents itself,” he says. The recurring points which pique Sloan’s attention are quite varied – light in the landscape, our relationships with nature, found images of social uprising, revolt, revolutionary activity and points of flux, the relationships that exist between music, art, and history – yet they form an enduringly constant cycle of creation. Sloan is interested in investigating and drawing out connections between these diverse fields of enquiry.

From imperial histories to art histories, Sloan identifies colonisation as the unifying strand that connects these fields of enquiry. “As artists, art-historical conventions and aesthetic traditions colonise us and our ways of seeing as much as political and ideological structures. I am fascinated on a broad, overarching scale by the question of what colonises us now."