Islands Drawing

Gary Burkon grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, pursuing painting. He completed his degree at the School of Contemporary Arts in Perth, Australia, shifting the focus of his practice to installation and sound art. In the following years he became increasingly interested in butoh and earth-centered spiritualism, fields that intimately informed the development of later work living between Japan, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Relationships between the body and the psychological dimensions it can suggest is a central theme in his mostly figurative work, with imagery sourced through diverse and personal esoteric fields of influence, positioning ‘outsider’ identities in relation to personal and transpersonal spaces, cultural identities, spirituality and the slippery spaces between. .