Paul Knight
Website: https://paulbknight.com/
Email: paul.knight@unsw.edu.au
Supervisors: Edward Scheer, Jaye Early
Paul Knight is an artist working with a diverse range of media including photography, hand-woven textiles, video, sound and installation. Knight’s work is known for its often abject yet gentle and nuanced depictions, as well as a sustained engagement with intimacy’s role in defining subjective relations. Knight’s current research draws on new writing from ecology and aesthetics, which discuss concepts of entanglement and interconnectedness, to consider how these ideas can inform foundations of subjectivity in psychoanalytical, philosophical and theoretical works. His work, investigating ideology and the machinations that lie behind the construction of self, examines how sexuality and knowledge can act as devices of proximity and how gentleness as an antidote to power can render potentials within our intimate lives. By extension, he considers the relational implications offered by a study, when its objectives are centred on a new aesthetics of intimacy.
Knight holds a BFA (hons) from the Victorian College of the Arts and in 2007 was awarded a Samstag Traveling Visual Arts Scholarship to complete an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (UK).
Knight has shown extensively in Australia and internationally, with works exhibited at 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (SA), University of NSW Galleries (NSW), Monash University Museum of Art (Vic), Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (WA), Museum of Contemporary Art (NSW), Art Gallery of NSW (NSW), National Gallery of Victoria (Vic), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Vic), Gertrude Contemporary (Vic), Centre for Contemporary Photography (Vic), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Vic) Monash Gallery of Art (Vic), Museum of Australian Photography (Vic), Chelsea Art Museum (USA), Palazzo delle Arti (IT), 13th Dong Gang International Photo festival (SK), Mauve (AT), 44th Art Cologne (DE), A Foundation (UK), Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (UK) and Neon Parc (Vic). Knight is a previous winner of the Bowness Photography Prize, has been included in Primavera at the MCA, NEW at ACCA, Melbourne Now at the NGV, he was a Gertrude Contemporary studio resident and a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts, London studio program.
- Research area
- Research outputs
- Intimacy
- Subjectivity
- Entanglement
- Ecology
- Non-human world
- Aesthetics
- Arriving Slowly, Ipswich Art Gallery, Ipswich, Australia (2024)
- Inner Sanctum: 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2024)
- L’ombre de ton ombre, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Australia (2024)
- L’ombre de ton ombre, University of NSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia (2024)
- L’ombre de ton ombre, Monash University of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2023)
- L’ombre de ton ombre, exhibition catalogue, with texts by Anthony Gardner, Paul Knight, Katie Mack and Oxana Timofeeva, published by Perimeter Editions, MUMA, UNSWG (Australia), ISBN: 9781922545220 (2023)
- Pliable Planes, University of NSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia (2022)
- Queer Stories, National Gallery of Victoria (International), Melbourne, Australia (2022)
- A Happy Hippie, Maruša Sagadin, with texts by Paul Knight and Miriam Stoney, published by Spector Books (Germany), ISBN: 9783959055178 (2022)
- Soft Furniture, Neon Parc, Melbourne, Australia (2021)
- Love Data, Two Inadequate Voices (online), text by Paul Knight (2021)
- Anywhere but here: MCA Primavera Acquisitions, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2020)
- Der Bote ist Der Tote, Mauve, Vienna, Austria (2020)
- Hauswerk: Bauhaus in Contemporary Art, McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin, Australia (2019)
- Counterfeits, Neon Parc, Melbourne, Australia (2019)
- Jump Into Bed With Me, published by Perimeter Editions (Australia), ISBN: 9780987637154 (2019)