Working across text and image, Adam Blackshaw creates visually immediate works that often appear playful, quirky and deceptively simple, while concealing more unsettling or complex ideas beneath the surface. His imagery embraces the paradox between humour and discomfort, innocence and violence, the familiar and the bizarre. A joke can become a criticism; a painting can become a philosophical question.

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Drawing on visual language from the periphery of mainstream arts practice - Outsider Art, Street Art, Mail Art, Folk Art, cartoons, tattoos, advertising, ephemera and popular culture - Blackshaw often transforms recognisable symbols into something unexpected. His work is clever without taking itself too seriously, using humour as a way of confronting the contradictions, absurdities and darker impulses of contemporary life.

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There is an intentionally imperfect, lived-in quality to the work. Lines, marks, hand rendered text and distressed surfaces retain a kind of weathered patina, giving the images the feeling of objects that have existed beyond the gallery - something found on a wall, in a forgotten book, on a discarded sign or in the margins of popular culture.

 

At its heart, Blackshaw’s practice is about looking at humanity from an angle that is simultaneously intelligent, irreverent and absurd. The work invites laughter, discomfort and curiosity in equal measure, asking the viewer to look again - and perhaps to recognise something of themselves in the joke. - Eve White, 2026

 

Adam Blackshaw graduated from the Canberra School of Art’s Graphic Investigation workshop in 1990, studying under the late Czech printmaker, Petr Herel. He has degrees in psychology, philosophy and visual arts, and has been a social worker, teacher and worked in the cultural sector for over 20 years with Arts Tasmania, the National Museum of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

 

He has been exhibiting since 1983 in Australia and internationally. He lives in Canberra and is represented in Australian and international collections.

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                                                        "Art should always seek to be, in some way, disruptive"