Sickness is a new and growing body of work by Steaphan Paton that sits in dialogue with artist Tony Clark’s famous ‘Sections from Clark’s Myriorama’ series. 

The series stemmed from Clark’s discovery of a curious antiquity from 1824: ‘Myriorama: A Collection of Many Thousand Landscapes’ is a children’s game which consists of 16 picture cards that featuring a segment of landscape with the same horizon line, so that each card is interchangeable.

It has been calculated that by using the cards, one could conjure up over 27 trillion different vistas and that it would take over 1000 trillion years to do so.

Following similar imposed constraints and reflections of the landscape genre, Steaphan Paton also restricts his painterly palette to four colours in Sickness I, II & III and presents an interchangeable and growing sequence of works. The artist has also employed finger painting in the works, which reference existing cave paintings in Gippsland and the iconic dot motif employed in some Aboriginal artistic/cultural practices.

Steaphan Paton (b.1985) is a Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist, descendant of the Gunai and Monero peoples, who grew up in Gippsland, Victoria. His works explore the physical and industrial conflicts between cultures, and specifically Indigenous cultures in colonised states.

Influenced by his home country, ‘Gippsland’, Paton uses painting, sculpture, installation and video to tell stories that have universality and force us to reflect using technology, humour or by breaking traditional methods.

Steaphan is represented by Tristian Koenig Gallery in Collingwood.