Artist Bio

David Charles Collins was born in Boorloo/Perth in 1988. He gained a BA at Curtin University, and graduated with an MFA from Sydney College of the Arts in 2017, specialising in photography and video media. His work has been exhibited across Australia, China, Germany and the UK, including solo shows in London, Berlin, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. David has been a finalist in competitions includings the Blake Art Prize, the Bowness Photography Prize, the Doug Moran Portrait Prize and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. His work has been reviewed in publications Art Collector magazine, Art Guide Australia, Scoop magazine and The Age, and is held in collections including the Art Gallery Of Western Australia, Home of the Arts Brisbane, Parliament House, the Patrick Corrigan Collection and the University Of Western Australia.

Artwork statement

In the artists’ words; ‘I’m interested in utilizing photo and video media to interrogate the uneven relationships that manifest between humans and animals and people and things in performance rituals. Using animals as a personal motif and symbol for the natural world, I engage in a performance exercise, inhabiting the precarious space between control and surrender. The resulting human-animal collaboration acts as analogue to experiential extremes, psychological struggles and power relationships, through which I propose catharsis as a powerful human experience for both learning and healing.

With a particular interest in toxic masculinity in Australian culture, I aim to attend to the multiple and conflicted readings of the male body and their translation into the social roles they inhabit. Investigating the male body as both violent and intimate, playful but harsh, erotic but confrontational, I hope to gain a better understanding of the facets and limitless possibilities of gender roles and identities.