About David Hickson
Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1971, Dave lived in Auckland, Canterbury and Singapore before moving to Australia to live in Sydney’s Inner West in 1997. He has lived on Minjungbal Country, in Ocean Shores, Northern Rivers, NSW since 2008.
Dave majored in sculpture at the National Art School in Sydney, winning the Julian Beaumont Sculpture Prize in 2002, and graduating with honours in 2003. He has completed teaching qualifications at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS) and NSW TAFE. He is a teacher at TAFE in Murwillumbah and Lismore and works out of his studio in Ocean Shores.
Dave uses sculpture, photography and drawing to help bring attention to issues in society but also to research concepts expressed in figuration and sometimes abstraction. Dave has had solo shows at the Tweed Regional Gallery in Murwillumbah and Robin Gibson Gallery in Sydney.
Dave is in group shows regularly including showing a number of times at Swell in the past, along with other sculpture exhibitions such as the Tom Bass figurative Sculpture Prize, The Ingenuity Sculpture Festival, the Byron Writers’ Festival Sculpture Exhibition, Urunga Small Sculpture Prize and some of the Defiance Gallery miniature shows. He has also exhibited in the JADA drawing prize, Salon des Refuses, Olive Cotton Portrait prize, he has won prizes in the Tweed Gallery Border Art Prize, Case Postcard show and Ocean Shores Art Expo.
He has completed a residency at Bundanon on the NSW South Coast, and is included in collections at Sydney University, Bundanon, Shoalhaven City Regional Gallery as well as many private collections.
2023 SWELL ARTWORK – Plover’s Protest
This is a sculpture of a pair of plovers made from reclaimed/recycled materials – mostly wood from a discarded bed base. The work depicts a pair of Plovers (Masked Lapwings). Following unprecedented flooding in our region a pair of plovers nesting beside our local canal, squawked and flapped around in the night as the rising flood water engulfed their eggs. A microcosm of a disaster that unfolded in our region. We need to do all we can to prevent the worst extremes of climate.
Come and see for yourself at SWELL Sculpture Festival, Pacific Parade, Currumbin 8th – 17th SeptemberT