David Noo­nan
David Noo­nan: Stagecraft

Stage­craft brings togeth­er silkscreen col­lages on fab­ric, tapes­tries and film which David Noo­nan has made between 2015 and 2020. Noo­nan repur­pos­es found pho­to­graph­ic images from his exten­sive per­son­al image archive to cre­ate images which are ambigu­ous, often with a focus on a soli­tary haunt­ing figure.

Black and white images appro­pri­at­ed from dis­parate sources includ­ing mag­a­zines relat­ing to avant-garde the­atre, film, design, archi­tec­ture, dance and music are com­bined to cre­ate new com­po­si­tions. Doc­u­men­tary images are trans­formed into fic­tion, sug­gest­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of the­atri­cal­i­ty and per­for­mance in the pub­lic realm.
Noonan’s col­lage works have a shad­owy sense of mys­tery, while the lay­er­ing of the fig­u­ra­tive and abstract imagery cre­ates a ten­sion between abstrac­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and between truth and illusion.

Bal­larat-born artist David Noo­nan lives and works in Lon­don. He is known for large-scale mono­chro­mat­ic col­lages on linen com­prised of fab­rics which are torn, fold­ed, cut, stitched and com­bined with silkscreened images. He used this approach to pro­duce his 2018 atmos­pher­ic film A dark and quiet place. Recent­ly, Noo­nan has made tapes­tries in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Bel­gian weavers, which have allowed him to com­bine art and tra­di­tion­al craft techniques. 

Noo­nan has been the sub­ject of solo exhi­bi­tions in Aus­tralia, the Unit­ed States and the Unit­ed King­dom and he has been includ­ed in notable sur­vey exhi­bi­tions and bien­ni­als. His work is in the per­ma­nent col­lec­tions of numer­ous muse­ums in Aus­tralia and internationally.

Curat­ed by Julie McLaren