Vanity | Neil Dawson

Feathers have long been significant to Dawson's artistic language; appearing across the world from the mind bending Touchdown, recently appearing beside Wellington's Transmission Gully, to the Art Gallery of NSW, Sam Neill's winery, and Shanghai's skyline.

Neil's new body of work, Vanity, turns his long-standing fascination with feathers toward a more pointed idea: the way beauty draws our eye, yet often distracts us from the deeper structure beneath it. Feathers are among nature's most sophisticated inventions, but they are also symbols of display, allure and show. In so titling this exhibition, Dawson plays with that duality, inviting us to admire the shimmer, curve and colour while also recognising the quiet intelligence that gives a feather its form.

These new works, precision-cut from aluminium and polycarbonate, exaggerate the seduction of the feather's surface: iridescent hues, playful enlargements, delicate barbs that catch the light. Neil's work is so often linked with a seeming ability to defy gravity and weight, and this exhibition typifies this delight - a gallery of feathers, floating around the viewer. But beneath that visual pleasure is the artist's ongoing interest in engineering, balance, and flight.

Vanity asks us to consider beauty not as something superficial, but as a gateway, to look longer, closer, and with renewed curiosity at what nature so effortlessly gets right.