Alasdair McLuckie (born Australia, 1984) was raised in a suburban Melbourne household amongst a collection of ethnographic artefacts. While studying fine art, he found himself drawn backwards from the prescribed western pathway, or notionality of the avant-garde, towards what he understood as a more honest path to art, through folk narrative and ‘primitivism’. Consequently, he sought instruction from his father, an amateur anthropologist, who taught him to use a rudimentary loom to produce intricate designs in woven beadwork. The subsequent development of his distinctive, obsessive and symbolic visual language is adopted from the disciplines of this meticulous craft and he equates its process-driven nature to seasonality, cycles and attendant fertility rituals.

McLuckie’s new installation for Siegfried Contemporary (in collaboration with mother’s tankstation) consists of sequential series of iconic bead paintings and low relief, ‘cut-away’ biro drawings on bookbinders’ board, both of which blur the distinctions between two and three-dimensional objecthood. McLuckie’s distinctive, exotic – quixotic, even – work has garnered significant curatorial interest in Australia; his first solo exhibition is represented in the collection of MoNA, Hobart; Ten Cubed, a private collection, where an evolving top ten selection of contemporary artists, is collected and exhibited in depth over ten years. With more recent work being featured in survey exhibitions, Future Primitive, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. McLuckie is the recipient of the Art in Australia / Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award, 2012 and Qantas SOYA Visual Art Award, 2013.