Stephen Birch

Stephen Birch was born in Melbourne in 1961, and lived and worked in Sydney until his death in 2007. He studied art at Prahran College and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Art and Design and in 2000 was awarded an MFA from the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of NSW. He exhibited his work in numerous group shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Wellington and had his first solo exhibition at Reconnaissance Gallery, Melbourne, in 1988. In 2007, The Museum of Contemporary Art mounted the survey exhibition, Stephen Birch: looking out my back door, which featured selected sculptures and installations from the previous decade of the artist’s practice.

Stephen Birch primarily worked in sculpture. He was concerned with developing sculptural language, drawing inspiration from the natural world and figurative tradition to work against the prevailing aesthetic of abstraction. Birch’s sculptures and installations employ everyday forms in an attempt to unsettle our sense of the comfortable or familiar. Playing with scale and context and using a range of materials that draw attention to the production process, his works draw audiences into eerie yet humorous parallel worlds, where linear readings become frustrated and the borders between reality and illusion are blurred.

- Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia