The empty chair: absence and witness

The empty chair is an object with an awkward abundance of meaning. It tells us that someone might sit, that weight and warmth once altered it, that a conversation or a solitary wait took place there. Yet nothing in its silhouette confirms what happened. The Empty Chair: Absence and Witness is built around that uncertainty: a seat becomes a device for making absence visible without reducing it to a symbol.

In my practice, sculpture, drawing, video, performance and sound meet around the same question. What can a work hold in the place of a person without claiming to recover them? The chair is one answer among many, alongside images, intervals, recorded rooms and gestures that outlive their maker. These works do not illustrate loss; they give it duration, surface and a position from which it can be witnessed.

The chair as a witness

A chair is designed around the possibility of a body. Its proportions anticipate posture, weight and movement, while its back marks where a head might turn. Look at an empty one long enough and its familiar geometry becomes strange. The absence seems to press against the seat, the arms and the space between the legs. What was ordinary becomes an instrument for registering what is missing.

My sculptures begin with this promise and interrupt it. Some seats appear compressed, tilted or joined to forms that make sitting impossible. Others are made too large for anyone present. Such distortions are not demonstrations of imperfection. They describe the distance between an object’s intended use and the circumstances of its display. A chair can remain perfectly recognisable while refusing to perform the role expected of it.

The viewer supplies part of the work. Looking at an empty seat, we may imagine a specific person, an earlier hour or an event never witnessed. The sculpture does not confirm those projections. Instead, it keeps them provisional, allowing the object to shift between the particular and the universal. Its emptiness is active rather than vacant, holding attention without resolving it.

Absence in three dimensions

Working in sculpture gives physical absence a weight that images often disguise. A drawn void can be closed by the next line, while a hollow in timber or steel keeps its own dimensions. Cast shadows deepen the spaces beneath and between forms. Surfaces record the pressure of making, and those marks make material presence inseparable from human presence.

Australian furniture and architecture offer familiar points of reference. Eucalyptus timber, plywood and sheet metal appear in kitchens, workshops, school rooms and shaded verandahs. A timber chair might suggest a kitchen table, a back porch or a community hall. Drawing on those associations, I make objects that seem familiar enough to invite use while remaining physically or emotionally unavailable. Their domestic character makes their refusal more affecting.

In these works, absence is never simply the lack of material. It is shaped by what surrounds it: a hollow made by casting, a seat divided by a seam, a support that ends without meeting the ground. Such details create a second body around the first, an implied body held in suspension. The object becomes a boundary between presence and disappearance, solid enough to touch but unable to return the touch.

The image that keeps looking back

The same tension moves into two-dimensional art, where an image can record a place while withholding its subject. A photograph of an empty chair may include evidence of recent occupation: a displaced shadow, an indentation, fabric caught beneath a leg. It may equally show a room arranged to suggest that occupation. The image stages absence and asks to be read as testimony, even when it cannot be verified.

Collage, drawing and photographic sequences allow gaps to operate differently. A figure can be removed through cropping, while repeated angles turn one location into several uncertain versions of the same event. Colour becomes important here. Muted greys, browns and blues hold the eye without providing dramatic release. They resemble the quality of light in rooms after someone has left, when the space remains legible but intimacy has withdrawn.

Video extends that withdrawal into time. A camera can watch a chair longer than a viewer would ordinarily tolerate, making waiting visible. A cut can erase the person who entered the frame, leaving the image to argue with its own continuity. These works consider how recording mediates witness. The camera preserves something, yet preservation changes the event into evidence, circulation and memory.

Time, sound and the body

Time is another material in the studio. Some works unfold through a measured sequence of images; others depend on a pause, a repeated frame or a sound that arrives after expectation has settled. Silence has texture in a gallery, where ventilation, distant footsteps and the hum of projection equipment reveal the room around the work. Even nothing audible carries information about distance and occupancy.

Sound can register an absent body more keenly than a visible figure. A chair may creak under imagined weight, a recording may capture reverberation within an empty chamber, or a voice might speak and then stop before completing its sentence. In Australian spaces such as railway platforms, stadium terraces and long suburban corridors, announced departures and echoing announcements create a public language of absence. These sounds enter the work without needing literal reproduction.

Performance allows that absence to move through the body. A performer may occupy a chair, leave it, or circle it without sitting. The chair remains behind as a score for the departing body. During the work, dust, slight movements of fabric and changes in balance preserve the trace of action. Afterwards, those traces recede, leaving viewers to reconstruct what occurred. The work becomes a record of disappearance that cannot become a full recovery.

Space as a vessel for memory

A room shapes what a work can mean. Height, light, acoustics and the distance between a viewer and an object alter the encounter. In a domestic interior, an empty chair might suggest domestic routine. In a civic building, it can recall a public meeting or someone waiting for an appointment. The same form carries different histories in different places, and its silence is never entirely neutral.

Site-specific installations make those differences unavoidable. The compact gallery rooms of Northbridge, Perth, often occupy converted industrial buildings where neighbouring studios and workshops remain visible. Work in those spaces can feel provisional, close and materially direct. By contrast, exhibitions reached through Melbourne’s laneways draw movement, shopfronts and street noise into the work. The architecture participates before the visitor enters.

Public collections create another set of conditions. At QAGOMA in Brisbane or the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, an empty seat may be encountered among works concerned with colonial history, family archives and social memory. Its scale changes, as does the institutional expectation that it hold public attention. Such contexts do not settle its meaning. They place private loss beside collective histories and make the visitor’s position as witness more complex.

Material traces and the ethics of display

Display introduces questions of stewardship. Dust gathers; timber changes with humidity; paint thins where a visitor brushes too close. Conservation protects an object from change, yet the meaning of absence depends upon traces that may be unstable. A repaired joint records damage and intervention together. The work’s history becomes part of its material condition rather than information kept outside it.

Collecting also raises the risk of substitution. One chair cannot stand in for every person who has died, and a photograph of an empty room cannot reproduce grief. The object may be acquired because it is affecting, while the circumstances of its making or the wishes of the people represented are left unexamined. Representation becomes an ethical relation when the work acknowledges limits, authorship and the consequences of looking.

The Australian art market operates through several routes: Creative Australia project funding, state arts agencies, dealer networks, artist-run editions, direct commissions and public acquisitions. These structures allow different forms of support, though they also privilege different kinds of value. Editioned works can reach more people, while scarcity and provenance affect the market price of unique objects. Neither collecting nor gifting settles the question of who has the right to witness.

Local speech can reveal another kind of framing. In an Australian gallery, the understated phrase “not bad for a first show” may carry genuine warmth. It lowers ceremony without dismissing the work. The same informality can make it easy to move from admiration to possession: “I’d love one for the house.” My practice treats that impulse as a meaningful response, but not a sufficient conclusion. The work can enter a home without becoming merely decor.

Witnessing without possession

To witness is to recognise that something has happened or is happening without assuming the right to explain it completely. Art offers a disciplined form of that attention. It makes absence perceptible while leaving the person encountered beyond direct access. This distinction protects the work from becoming a substitute for memory, testimony or conversation.

Some pieces include contributions from participants: recorded speech, written fragments, traces of movement or sounds collected in particular places. These materials add voices to the exhibition, yet consent and context matter. A person’s words should not become available merely because they enrich the work. Participation requires care about privacy, editing and the relationship between the contributor and the institution displaying their contribution.

The archive extends this responsibility beyond the gallery. Documentation preserves an encounter, but it can also detach the work from the conditions that produced it. Images circulate on phones and screens, where scale and duration change again. I approach documentation as a continuation of the practice rather than a neutral record. Notes, installation views and unfinished states can reveal decisions without pretending to settle them.

Seen together, these works make a form of living presence available. A chair can face a room. A recording can contain the acoustic residue of a body. A drawing can hold an interruption. None of these forms restores what has gone; each marks a position from which loss can be acknowledged without being aestheticised into spectacle. The encounter remains open to difference, including that of the person looking.

The empty chair offers no resolution, and its lack of resolution is where its usefulness lies. It asks for sustained attention, for the willingness to stay with an unresolved trace rather than fill it with a reassuring story. Across sculpture, image, sound and performance, that attention becomes a practice of mourning: a way of making room for absence while keeping the present visible.

For exhibition proposals, commissions, collection conversations or studio visits, please use the contact details on this site. I welcome conversations with artists, curators, collectors and audiences across Australia and beyond, and can provide further information about the works and their documentation.