ANDY HUTSON
AUTOFLORA
APRIL 19 - MAY 20 2023

Andy Hutson is lutruwita/Tasmania-based artist. His sculptural practice leans toward the low-fi and handmade, using simple materials to tell stories about the natural world and our role within it.

Andy Hutson’s Autoflora is a series of sculptural relief works. The exhibition was titled after Hutson noticed some cars in his neighbourhood were growing tiny plants and lichens. The title also refers to the surrealist technique of automatism – allowing the unconscious mind to drive the creative process. In this case, Hutson is thinking about the play between weeds and urban spaces, and letting these relationships inform the visual choices made as the works evolve. The patterns, colours and textures in these sculptures are borrowed from his encounters on the bike path, which runs behind a series of industrial areas, and past rivulets and roadside reserves. Although Hutson’s actual ‘floral’ motifs are quite sparse, each artwork circles back to this intersection between the natural and industrial.

Andy Hutson completed an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2008. His work has been exhibited across Australia, including in the exhibition Gorillas in Our Midst curated by Pip Mott at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), in Hobart in 2019. Hutson has undertaken both local and international residencies, including Grizedale Arts (UK) and a recent studio residency at Contemporary Art Tasmania. Hutson has been curated into Dark Mofo (Disquiet (Off You) curated by Stephanie Han, 2017) and two Mona Foma festivals (No Place Like Home curated by Emma Pike, 2021 and Dumb Function curated by Kim Jaeger, 2023). He has received numerous grants and prizes, and his work was shortlisted for the TIDAL20 art prize in Devonport. Most recently Hutson was awarded the significant $100,000 VACS Major Commissioning Projects grant from the Australia Council for his 2024 project Apologue Isle. In addition to his sculpture practice, Hutson creates jewellery and functional objects which play with scale and complement his larger work.

“I pretty much position my practice in the intersection of these two things – culture/nature. When I lived in Naarm, I found myself drawn to urban spaces where natural forces had inundated or taken over the place – overgrown building sites, or even just weeds popping up in expected places, and I referred to these places both directly and indirectly in my work. In lutruwita/Tasmania, this has kind of flipped – the natural world is so omnipresent here, it always feels a bit like the human-made is kind of pushing outwards against the non-human.”

— Andy Hutson

Read our interview with Andy Hutson