Tom Keukenmeester
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Born in Adelaide, Tom Keukenmeester is an emerging multidisciplinary artist working on Kaurna land, practicing predominantly in painting and sculpture. Tom’s work is heavily informed by art history, engaging in themes that create dialogue between the historical and the contemporary, often alluding to history’s cyclical nature. The work embraces crosscultural thinking to explore personal and contemporary societal narratives in a playful and irreverent manner.

“I begin my process by representing my subjects from a cache of photos taken on my iPhone, archival imagery and my own imagination. The process combines memories of childhood animations with those of more recent museum visits, using both instinct and imagination to guide their form.”

Recent work has explored the notion of idolatry in a secular society, reimagining idolised figures, the monuments we build to them and their immortalisation. While exploring ideas of adornment and worship, the work elicits questions of authority and authorship of our histories. This reimagining proposes that throughout history there will always be a multiplicity of stories, interpretations and meanings, and that we cannot settle on one as being definitive.