David Eastwood

Vestiges

19 September – 17 October 2026

opening 3-5pm Saturday 19 September

EXHIBITION FLOOR TALK
DAVID EASTWOOD IN CONVERSATION WITH VICTORIA CARRUTHERS
3–3.30pm Saturday 17 October 2026

Please join us on the last day of David Eastwood’s exhibition Vestiges for a floor talk with the artist in conversation with art historian and writer Dr Victoria Carruthers. The conversation will explore the images, ideas, and processes that inform Eastwood’s exhibition.

Dr Victoria Carruthers is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the Australian Catholic University. She writes widely on contemporary Australian art and is an internationally recognised scholar of surrealism. Her monograph Dorothea Tanning: Transformations was published by Lund Humphries in 2020.

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It is not unusual for artists to accumulate collections of objects for use as models from which to work. Such collections often comprise an idiosyncratic menagerie of things, ranging from the commonplace to the esoteric: domestic tableware, taxidermy animals, skeletons, plaster casts, and various other seemingly random items. Like a cabinet of curiosities, the studio prop collection functions as a microcosm of the world, assembling specimens from lived experience into a concentrated field of observation.

The objects within these collections occupy a precarious ontological category. When, for instance, a bottle becomes a studio prop, it is unmoored from its designated utility and recast as an exemplar of “bottleness.” In this respect, the studio prop occupies an ambiguous position between object and image.

Vestiges is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by David Eastwood that explores the peculiar status of such objects. Presented within staged settings detached from everyday contexts, the works employ a heightened sense of artifice to foreground the processes through which objects become images, contemplating the transformation that turns, say, a vase into a still life or a bed sheet into drapery.

Continuing the artist’s engagement with 3D scanning technologies, digitally manipulated models form the basis of the works in the exhibition. The objects depicted are virtual. Simulated and endlessly mutable, they undergo a protracted process of translation from scanned object, to digital model, to painted or drawn image.

In this exhibition, familiar objects appear displaced from the world that gave them meaning. Isolated, distorted, and ambiguously scaled, the forms are recognisable yet estranged. Through layered processes of mediation and manipulation, they are rendered as vestiges of their former selves, hovering between artefact and apparition.