1.2 UWS Alumni profile: Ben Denham

UWS Alumni profile: Ben Denham

Blue Mountains-based conceptual artist and UWS graduate, Ben Denham, was recently among several artists to perform at the ‘Biodiversity and the Arts’ event, held at the Australian Museum and hosted by the University of Western Sydney on 11 September.

Ben, who completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours and a PhD at UWS, was also involved in producing a television commercial aired on TVS to promote the event, which aimed to explore the role that the arts has to play in the future of the natural world. Joining sound artist Roger Dean and poet Hazel Smith, Ben created a series of four short films for the event entitled ‘In Elements’.

A prolific practising artist, Ben has exhibited his work at over 20 exhibitions and performance events across Australia and in Singapore and Mexico, has won prizes including the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2002 and the Ozco ‘New Work’ Grant in 2007/08, and has undertaken several residencies. In February this year, he was Artist in Residence at Serial Space in Sydney, where he undertook interviews with ex-UWS visual arts students, staff and members of the broader art community to document the teaching and art practice which took place as part of the UWS visual arts degree program.

“The strength of that program was really in developing the conceptual side of your practice and making sure you were rigorous in your ideas, and I carried that through to my PhD,” Ben says. “In terms of the technical aspects, which are also very important for any artist, I spent a lot of time developing that on my own.”

In addition to his conceptual films – with In Perspective and Unaided Human Flight: First Instructional among his most recent work – Ben is also producing the latest version in his Rewriting series.

“That project is part of my visual arts practice, and involves using my body in different ways to produce text, through attaching prosthetics to my body or other mechanisms to write text,” he says.

Ben plans to continuing working in both the contemporary art and film realm, but says “ultimately I’d like to write and direct feature films”.

You can view Ben’s work at www.bendenham.com.