JASON WATERHOUSE

Biography

As well as contributing to numerous group exhibitions, Jason Waterhouse has been awarded with several art prizes (including the prestigious Moreland Sculpture Prize, and The Sculpture by the Sea’s Young Sculptors Prize), and has been recognised as a finalist for many more, including the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Prize, The Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, and the McClelland Sculpture Prize. Jason Waterhouse has also had several solo exhibitions and permanent public works in Melbourne and Ballarat.

In 2009, after a number of years teaching in the Visual Arts at Swinburne University, Jason Waterhouse and his partner Magali Gentric founded the design space wolf at the door. In 2010 they followed this with Stockroom in Kyneton, a 1000sqm makers and artists complex which includes, a retail concept store, café, project spaces and 2 contemporary art galleries in the Central Highlands of Victoria.

Jason Waterhouse lives on a rural property in Central Victoria with his partner and three children.

Tools of the Trade
installation view

Jason Waterhouse’s sculptural practice is underpinned by ideas of contemporary architecture, urbanization and how we live with the ‘stuff’ around us. In Waterhouse’s studio, ubiquitous objects such as the body of a car, a gardener’s shed, pencils, tools and tree branches undergo a series of interventions resulting in a hybridized object that occupies an uncanny space between the past and the present, the natural and the manufactured.

In Tools of the Trade, Waterhouse presents a series of everyday hand and power tools that have been seamlessly modified through a number of varied sculptural interventions. Screwdrivers can be seen morphing into branches, an electric sander excretes an explosive lurid glossy pink growth, axes grow burls, antique tools sprout crystalline growths and play host to otherworldly geological forms.

Tools of the Trade investigates the innate potential of things. Each object alludes to an inner power, some bursting and rupturing from within, others appearing to slowly grow and morph into hybrid forms. There is also a subtle subversion at hand. In making, the tool is the starting point, the implement required to perform the task, to create, to build, however they also demarcate the end, stripped of their functionality the maker also becomes the made. Imbued with Waterhouse’s surreal and often humorous visual language, Tools of the Trade presents hybridized prototypes