About
Sean Loughrey was born in Melbourne in 1964 and studied at Warrnambool Institute of Advanced Education (Now Deakin University), the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne and RMIT University, Melbourne. He completed his PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts and Music, University of Melbourne in 2016. He is currently a Lecturer in Art and Performance at Deakin University. He has been involved in exhibitions and collaborative projects for artist-run spaces and publicly funded galleries since 1988. He was also involved with the artist run initiative/collective ‘Ocular Lab’ between 2001-2010.
Sean works within a multi-disciplinary art practice, which includes photography, video, painting, drawing and sound-based projects. His Installations, paintings and photographic work examine the notion of imagined worlds. At times these ‘worlds’ acknowledge political histories, at other times histories within art.
The Installation projects are theatrically inspired, 'imagined worlds,' staged in and outside the gallery context. Many of these projects have “re-imagined” a specific work of Samuel Beckett as a springboard for a new work. The PhD research examined 1950s Communist Party of Australia archival material, Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1958) and the term "ekphrasis" - the telling of vision, in which ‘voice,’ seen as a type of material, was collectively exhibited.
Most recent studio-based work has examined photography as material, in which digital and analogue processes are united reflecting on representational and non-representational histories alongside associated political voices.