Liam Benson is a multi-disciplinary socially engaged artist based on Dharug Land, Western Sydney, New South Wales. Incorporating performance, photography, video and textiles, his practice reflects on the exchange within identity and culture as a living dualistic process which is both informed by and challenges historical, political, and social consciousness.
Liam’s practice is informed by working collaboratively with community through creative projects that supports access and inclusion, including The Adorned Collective and We Are Studios. Liam has over fifteen years of experience in arts education, community engagement and creative workshop facilitation within nationwide cultural and education institutions, and community spaces.
Liam Benson’s works are held in significant public and private collections including The Art Gallery of NSW, The MCA Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Artbank and Western Sydney University.
Verdure – luminous beings, underscores the importance of reciprocal exchanges in both human relationships and natural ecosystems that maintain holistic health for both individuals and the communities they form.
Nature’s unbiased, intrinsic responses within ecosystems serve as a model for understanding and processing the personal and communal experiences, lived experience and emotional learning that inform Benson’s cultural identity. Listening to and learning from nature, highlights the significance of both spoken and unspoken, direct and subtle exchanges that occur within inherited and chosen family relationships and community.
Liam Benson’s methods, materials, shapes, and designs draw from early learnings and skills passed down from a grandmother and mother deeply rooted in Scottish culture and a love of making. In parallel to the ecosystem of family cultural exchange, the exhibition features work that explore the subtle interplay within queer cultural and communal exchange. It emphasises the similarities between semi-biotic relationships in nature and the cultural dynamics within the queer experience.
Within the process of translating intimate memories, experiences, relationships that have formed Benson’s queer cultural experience, it also gives weight to the subtle, disparate, osmosis of queer cultural legacy that is transferred through the subconscious and indirect queer legacy of storytelling, art and language.
This body of work is a process-based cultivation and acknowledgement of the parallels between natural environments and Benson’s queer cultural lived experience. Through the colours, motifs, stitches and textures, Benson is allowing his own understandings to emerge within the work, that will become the artists contribution to the enduring growth and existence of queer experiences and culture.
Benson’s exhibition Verdure – luminous beings is on until Sunday 28 September.
Image credits: install images Verdure – luminous beings: Liam Benson, Ironbark Gallery July 2025, Renee Porter.
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