From Garbage to Gallery

“It’s 8am and a typically beautiful morning in Byron Bay. The ocean is impossibly blue and inviting, the golden sands littered with early sunbathers, power-walkers, surfies waiting and watching, the body-surfers riding their waves into the shore. John walks towards me, carrying three rubbish bags, all full.
“ 'I’m collecting my palate,' he says with a grin."

So journalist Mark O’Brien describes his first meeting with John Dahlsen. The Australian has embraced the Osho vision for over twenty years. Meditation’s impact on his life and work has enabled Dahlsen, he says, “to respond to what is and to move with the new.”

Born in Sydney, Australia, Dahlsen studied art in Melbourne, then went on to be a lecturer at the University of WA, at Curtin University WA, and at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education, in addition to teaching painting and drawing at various secondary schools, as well as in Amsterdam, England, Germany, Sweden, and the States.

His work is featured in private and public collections in Australia, Japan, Europe, India and the United States. In the year 2000 he was appointed Official Artist of the New Millennium for the 'Clean up Australia,' and 'Clean up the World' organizations. Clearly he has 'arrived' as an artist.

Yet a few years ago Dahlsen felt he had come to the end of one particular line of expression, and was faced with having to relinquish an identity built up over seventeen years. Under-standably that created a certain fear, but it was also a relief and, “Unknown to me at the time,” he reflects, “it was to create a huge space where something new could happen.”
In that gap, at the crossroads in his life, he began collecting the driftwood that washes up on the shoreline of the beach near his home in Byron Bay, with a view to making furniture for himself. At the same time he noticed all the trash on the beach – old rubber sandals, rope, soft drink bottles, divers’ glow sticks, white foam, bottle tops, paper, Styrofoam and even the odd cigarette lighter. The diversity of shapes, colours and textures tickled his artist’s imagination, and Dahlsen started collecting the rubbish and then transforming it into an art form.

His ingenious displays – arrange-ments in large sheets of Perspec – prompted one journalist to write of his “remarkable facility for organizing the mundane into fascinating litter-scapes, while at the same time cleaning up the beach and recycling other people’s neglect. All that he finds transcends the commonplace once in his hands.”

The art crowd loves him. In previous years he garnered the Cann River Art Prize, the WA Department for the Arts Grant, the Geraldton-Greensborough Art Award, and the Artrage Festival Subsidy Funding. Most recently he was awarded the $Aus 15,000 Wynne Prize for Sculpture and Landscape.

And environments love him, evidenced by his appointment as Australian environmentalists’ Official Artist of the New Millennium, and his being currently in negotiations with the “Clean Up the World,” and the UN to erect one of his artworks at the UN headquarters in New York.

“I have chosen the forecourt there, where I intend to make a 30 meter x 3 meter work under glass, embedded in the pavement. It is a really exciting project to be involved in,” enthuses Dahlsen. “When it is in place, I feel it will have a great impact, with its many layers of meaning.” It will be, in effect, a worldwide effort, as the 'Clean Up the World' project intends to ask many of the nations participating in their annual clean-up campaign to send Dahlsen boxes of beach 'found plastic' to his studio. All that will be incorporated in his proposed artwork.

Unpretentious and self-effacing, the artist steers clear of being labelled a crusader. “I’m just making art out of it all, and that alone provides an example to people, if they are open. All the messages about the environment are there in the work. I have noticed that the more I involve myself with this work, the more I naturally feel for the environment.”

Of greater significance than any recognition or awards is the happiness and surprise to find that, as he puts it, “I had gotten to a point within myself where this transformation and trust could happen. That would have been impossible had I not been a meditator for all these years.”

It is something of this inner aspect of his life that he hopes is reflected in whatever he does. “I’d like to provoke in the viewer some Zen-like quality of meditativeness…of light and of quietude.” The reaction to his art, Dahlsen says, has been “Incredibly responsive. The pieces touch everybody, from eight to eighty-year olds. Because each piece is so multi-layered, people find something unique in them. A comb, a pair of sunglasses, a single sandal – anything that resonates sparks a memory.”

http://www.johndahlsen.com