Lincoln Austin, Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln, 2020– , polyurethane-coated nylon fabric, nylon thread, carbon fibre, brass, 300cm (diameter); photo: Steve Ryan

Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us, exhibition installation view, Ipswich Art Gallery, 2021; image courtesy Ipswich Art Gallery

Video of the public activation of Lincoln Austin’s Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln (2020– ) invites audiences through the doors of the Ipswich Art Gallery and into a tightly curated survey of his last 20 years. In the video, a lightweight and colourful hexagonal ball, a geometric ‘kite’, freewheels through an urban landscape, and is described in the catalogue by exhibition curator Samantha Littley as ‘a prop, a costume and a performance’. The most recent and personally informed work in the exhibition, its joy pervades the whole experience. Titled ‘The Space Between Us’, the survey inside the galleries otherwise explores the optical, spatial and geometric qualities of Austin’s sculpture, requiring the viewer to move around every work to fully appreciate their visual liveliness.

Austin’s early training was in theatre set design in Adelaide. Driven to explore making something a little bit more universal, he looked to geometry and mathematics, using process and set parameters to find a generative model. Austin’s earliest interests, visible in Held by Logic (2000), express a consistent concern with engaging viewers physically.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, grouped by mood and materials rather than chronology, and describes his deep engagement with space and pattern. Austin’s geometric methodology is an iterative model that, as Littley identifies in the catalogue, ‘establishes a connection between artist, object, and audience that is central to Austin’s aims’.

Layers of materials are used to evoke memory, reinforced by titles such as None of That Matters Now (2016). Shadow Boxing #7 (2013) requests that we move like the title suggests to appreciate the nuance in this optical mix. And Deep Space uses cut flyscreen to recreate the depths of perspective through ocular melding. Hang on to Yourself (also 2017), a maze-like installation, captures the viewer as participant and subject with projected light in a darkened room.

The joy in Don’t Get Carried Away with Yourself, Lincoln is, in some ways, a revelation of the personal impetus that Austin rejected some 20 years ago, channelled in previous works into mathematical investigations. However, in its more private reality (as a gay man loath to express too much joy), it provides the most poignant entry and epilogue to this survey.