Witness Box

source: sgarcomau

Daniel Templeman completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Queensland College of Art in 1996, honours at Queensland University of Technology in 1999 and is currently a candidate in the Doctorate program at QCA. He has exhibited in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and has completed several major public art commissions including the Brisbane Magistrates Court, Tugun Bypass, Southbank Educational Precinct, 31 Queen Street, Melbourne and most recently the Macrossen Tower in Brisbane’s CBD. Templeman was awarded the Queensland Art Gallery’s Melville Haysom Memorial Scholarship in 1997, first prize in the object-based category of the Churchie Art Prize in 2000 and 2001. He was highly commended for his work in the 2009 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. Templeman’s work is held in state and private collections across Australia and abroad.

Daniel Templeman’s creative practice poses questions. Can the object be the subject? How do we perceive pattern in motion? Can an artwork incite a gap? What does an artwork reveal and what does it conceal? Whether it is a large-scale concrete sculpture or a delicate carbon-transfer drawing, Templeman invites us to question the artefact’s construction, physicality and finish. When considering the process and material exploration of his works, the viewer is ultimately questioning what is revealed and concealed. It is this conundrum that gives his work an illusive quality placing the viewer within the work. The artefact is as much about what it does as what it is. The artefact incites a gap, to be occupied by the viewer.
As a teenager Templeman spent time working in his father’s cabinet-making business where he developed an appreciation for materials and the illusionary quality of veneers, laminates and polishes. Later at art school when confronted by Minimalism he began to see potential parallels between construction and dematerialisation. Templeman’s ongoing creative process oscillates between hard edge reality and perceptual trickery, object and construction.