Dean makes art from the things most of us would happily put in the hard rubbish pile. Which, as it turns out, is one way of getting the last laugh.
There are artists who work in marble. Artists who work in oils. Artists who spend months contemplating the existential possibilities of a blank canvas. And then there is Dean Stewart, who looks at an old object and thinks: That could be something.
Based in Ballina in the Northern Rivers, Stewart is an artist and designer with an eye for the overlooked. His raw materials are found objects, reclaimed bits and pieces, discarded things and everyday ephemera — the sort of stuff that has already had one career and is presumably expecting retirement.
Not so fast.
He gives these objects another life, assembling them into contemporary sculptures that explore form, place, memory and the stories that accumulate around the things we live with. The results are clever without being showy, considered without taking themselves too seriously, and often just odd enough to make you stop and look twice.
Which is precisely the point.
There is a particular pleasure in encountering Stewart’s work. You might recognize a material, a shape or an object, but you won’t necessarily recognize what it has become. Familiarity gets slightly scrambled. The everyday is nudged sideways. Something you might previously have ignored suddenly demands your attention.
It’s a neat trick.
It also helps that Stewart has spent years thinking about space, shape and presentation. With a background in interior design and visual merchandising, he understands the mechanics of making things look good — where they sit, how they relate to one another, what catches the eye and what makes a composition sing.
In other words, he knows how to arrange a room. He just happens to fill it with things you probably wouldn’t have invited inside. That combination of design discipline and playful curiosity gives his work its particular character. There is craftsmanship, certainly, but there is also mischief. Stewart isn’t interested in making precious objects simply because they’re destined for a gallery wall. He seems much more interested in what happens when an object with a past is given a new context — and perhaps a slightly ridiculous new job.
His work asks us to reconsider the humble object. What makes something valuable? When does rubbish become material? When does an old thing become an artwork? And, perhaps most importantly, who decided that the things at the bottom of the shed weren’t interesting?
Stewart’s career suggests he may be onto something. He has held solo exhibitions at Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre in Murwillumbah, Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Ballina and Lone Goat Gallery in Byron Bay. In 2026, he was selected as the inaugural Artist in Residence at Grafton Regional Gallery as part of the Northern Rivers Artist Exchange Residency Program, in conjunction with Arts Northern Rivers.
More recently, he won the Small Worlds Sculpture Prize presented by Trackways Sculpture in Murwillumbah and was named a finalist in both the Wollumbin Art Award and the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in Sydney.
His work has also found its way into private collections in Lennox Head, Ballina, Mullumbimby, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Oxfordshire in the UK. So, yes, that thing you were about to throw away might have artistic potential.
Although before you start dragging the contents of the garage into the living room, there is a catch. Stewart’s work isn’t simply about finding old things. It’s about knowing what to do with them. The difference between an intriguing assemblage and a pile of junk is, presumably, somewhere in the eye, the hand and the considerable amount of thought in between.
That is where Stewart’s design background comes into play.
His sculptures have a sense of balance and proportion that prevents the chaos from becoming, well, chaos. Materials converse. Shapes collide. Textures interrupt one another. Objects lose their original purpose and acquire another. The whole thing feels deliberate, even when it appears to be having a bit of a laugh.
And perhaps that’s what makes the work so appealing.
Stewart takes the stuff of everyday life — the worn, the unwanted, the slightly battered and the previously useful — and gives it a starring role. He asks us to look again at the things we thought we knew.
There is something wonderfully Northern Rivers about that. In a place celebrated for its natural beauty, creative energy and healthy suspicion of anything too conventional, Stewart has found his own territory somewhere between design, sculpture, humorArt and archaeology.
Only his archaeological finds may have been destined for the tip.
It turns out they had other plans.
And our celebrated artist of the hour, thankfully, did too.
By: Lucas Raven
Great article! – it highlights the work of this Australian artist that teaches us how we can help the environment by giving old materials a new lease in life – if we know how to look.
Thank you Ximena, we are very glad you are enjoying our content. Dean is a very talented artist indeed.