Lauren Brincat

“Art is my first language, English is my second,” says Lauren Brincat, not as any sort of explanation, but more a manner of being. Working across performance, sculpture, video, and installation, Brincat’s practice can be interpreted as quiet provocations that point to the political potential of art and how we communicate beyond lingual forms.

Brincat tells me that painting came first and performance later. She initially trained in painting at Sydney College of the Arts and remembers the painting department as the only discipline at the time where you could move beyond the form. She recalls painter and lecturer Matthys Gerber making a call to arms to her cohort, asking “why are you all still painting? It’s dead!” Around 2006 Brincat started utilising performance, staging actions in her signature uniform (a black Bloch’s leotard and black skinny jeans) and recording them using a handycam to create documentary video works. It is no coincidence that during this time she lived in her studio, in a complex with neighbouring artist Mike Parr, who, over conversations, further incited a post-disciplinary approach which prompted new attempts to communicate with audiences through performative action.

Prior to staging these performances, Brincat created hard-edge paintings on canvas, which shifted to painting on drum skins. Appropriating this instrument into her actions, the drum kit became her Duchampian object. Audaciously punk in spirit, she pushed the materiality of the drum kit by burning it, burying it, steam rolling it, asking Adam Cullen to shoot it, and investigating how the army could blow it up. She called the Australian Defense Force every week and for a time they entertained her request until she realised she was being merely placated.

Brincat’s experimental spirit was nurtured by Blair French, who encouraged Brincat not to ask for permission, leading her to throw a drum kit out of the window of Artspace (to an unsuspecting French who was the director at this time), in an act that Brincat remembers as “art escaping art.” When reflecting on these works, Brincat remarked that the drum kit could have been any material as she was interrogating the status of the art-object. The valorisation of the instrument was questioned as the drum kit began to take hold, pulling into focus the influence of music on her practice and the visual arts more broadly. This impact is evident in her collaboration with Bree van Reyk titled Molto Echo, 2016, which was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the institution. This performance installation included seven drum kits and drummers, who were directed by Brincat to interrupt the quietness of the gallery and call upon the audience to participate.

A Sydney based artist, Brincat was born in Western Sydney, but has spent many periods abroad, where she has absorbed herself in artistic communities; researching, making, and longing for home. After winning the 2009 Helen Lempiere Travelling Scholarship, Brincat relocated to Europe and undertook a mentorship with media artist Johanna Billing, living across Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm.

Whilst in residence at Artspace in 2011, Brincat met the Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, who commented on the utopian dimension of her practice stating that “you have to walk in traffic.” Brincat remembers not grasping what he meant at the time, but it prompted a move to Mexico in 2012 where she was introduced by Medina to Francis Alÿs. A week later she had lunch with Alÿs, and shortly after that she was using Alÿs’ production team to video document herself attempting to hang off a ten metre Olympic diving platform until she could no longer hang-on for her 2012 work 10 Metre Platform. Influenced by Bas Jan Ader’s 1971 work Broken Gall (Organic), Brincat recalls being petrified and, after trying for eight hours, she was unable to perform the action. The depiction of failure ultimately became the work.

Brincat continued to place her body at the centre of her practice. She began documenting a variety of psychological states to accompany each action as a means to explore where spoken language fails. From 2008-16 Brincat created a series of “walking works” that explore solitude, nostalgia, endurance, and bravery. These simple actions depict Brincat’s form, disappearing from the frame as she moves beyond the camera’s view. Capturing her acquiescent journey down a bustling street in Mexico, or her following the demarcations of an airport tarmac, these performances were melodramatic acts of self-portraiture. This intention subsists in Hear This, 2011, which documents Brincat sitting alone in her Berlin studio using a wedge of watermelon as a telephone to talk to her mother in Australia, whilst slicing and eating the residual watermelon in her lap, sticky juice dribbling over her. The action is steeped with greedy yearning but leaves room for the viewer to interpret.

Brincat’s practice is brave, with a puckish approach that leaves space for chance and spontaneity. Assured and steadfast in setting the parameters, she tends to relinquish control through the process of making work. Her practice has a predilection to denying an outcome to the artistic encounter. This open-ended tendency can be seen through the deployment of unknown elements in her work. For example, in Tutti Presto FFF, 2022-23, presented during the 2022 Vivid Sydney festival at the Sydney Opera House, the wind is activated as a “buoyant” unnamed performer, prompting audiences to consider the current inflection point of the climate crisis. Described by Brincat as a “performance instrument,” the two 190 square-metre silk musical scores are “played” by a group of performers while a group of drummers read and perform its music.

When I asked what drew her to fabric, Brincat replies, “the materials find me more than I find them.” As a child she was surrounded by fabric, colour, and patterns. Her grandmother ran Bonds’ sewing department and would bring patterns home to make clothes. Brincat tells me that her first sailcloth was given to her, sparking a fascination with the material’s possible reconfigurations. Her 2015-16 installation Salt Lines: play it as it sounds was exhibited at Carriageworks for the 2016 Biennale of Sydney. Another “performance instrument” featuring a forty-two metre sailcloth configured with church bell ropes, the work invited contributions by other artists who activated, rearranged, or maneuvered the installation daily.

Brincat has expanded her performance practice into community engagement projects with The Plant Library, 2019, in conjunction with the MCA’s C3West program. This project saw the exchange of stories from the residents of the newly constructed suburb of Rouse Hill in Sydney’s outer west, for native seedlings. When do I breathe?, 2024, was a year-long video and performance project with the Randwick community developing an artistic response to the value of care in our society. When do I breathe? will be presented at Newcastle’s The Lock-Up this March.

There is a strong conceptual drive in Brincat’s art, drawing on the legacy of conceptual art. Her practice has grown from transgressive spirit to covert protest. A domain for intuitively led exploration, her work harbors an ever-present interrogation of the value of art, a questioning that is far more important than reaching conclusions.

Exhibition
When do I breathe?
1 March – 25 May 2025
The Lock-Up, Newcastle

Photosynthesisers: Women and the lens
16 February – 25 May 2025
Te Uru Auckland, New Zealand

Drape and the Weave
July 2025
Pavé d’Orsay Paris, France

Soft pink-orange performance for Seafood Extender
September 2025
Sydney Fish Market

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.  
Images courtesy of the artist