Jud Wimhurst has been making playful and vibrant 3D works of art for more than 20 years but now, after being commissioned by the Bendigo Art Gallery to create the biggest exhibition of his career to date, the Kyneton-based artist is promising it will be most playful creations yet.
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Named the gallery’s ‘Going Solo’ artist for 2016 this week, Mr Wimhurst is under strict instructions to keep quiet about the details of the solo exhibition to be launched late this year.
“But I can tell you it will be a whole new body of work and it will be like nothing I’ve done in the way that it will be installed in the gallery,” Mr Wimhurst said.
“It will be immersive and, also, the general public will be invited to play with sculptures – that's probably the biggest change.
“It's a completely new idea and I'm very excited because it's actually an idea I've had for years – probably ten years – I’ve just been waiting for the opportunity to do it.”
But though the form will be different, the themes that have defined the 41-year-old’s career will remain the same.
“There will be those references to popular culture and fast food, there will be an element of play, there's a lot of humour in it but also with a dark theme running underneath it,” he said.
The artist described the exhibition as a career highlight.
“I’ve done big commercial exhibitions before but this is different – it’s in a public gallery and the kind of numbers who go through the Bendigo Gallery is much higher than in commercials,” he said.
“The great thing too, about a public gallery, is that you get all types of people looking at your work – families, older people, children – that’s exactly what you want as an artist.”
He said it was also something of a homecoming – his mother is from Rochester and father from Tongala and Bendigo invariably featured in childhood holidays.
“Mum was especially wrapped, Bendigo has always been somewhere special for her.”
“I come from a long line of men who spend their time in sheds,” he said.
“Dad was an architect and an engineer too – so I guess it’s genetic.”
But Bendigo Art Gallery’s ‘Going Solo’ 2016 artist’s genes are of a more creative bent. His 3D artworks – which explore popular culture and the relationship between people and objects – are often often big, complex and made from scratch in his Kyneton shed.
For his 2010 exhibit ‘Masks for Modern Tribe’, the DIY artist built a thermoforming machine to melt plastic into moulds he sculpted.
“I try to replicate the manufacturing processes in my studio as part of my art practice – those were really slow at first… but by the end I almost had my own little production line,” he said.
