Ian Sinclair is an experimental artist, playwright and performance curator based on Gadigal Country/Eora. His practice spans immersive and participatory installations, subcultural and niche community collaborations, large-scale world-building artworks and intimate, poetic family dramas. His projects consider queerness, kinship, “what ifs”, inescapable pasts, alternate presents and not-too-distant futures.
Ian has presented work nationally and internationally, from major arts institutions to non-traditional venues, often collaborating with LGBTQIA+ communities, activists, scientists, sportspeople, hobbyists and thought leaders to co-create live artworks and plays.
As a playwright, Ian writes expansive, hyper-poetic monologues alongside stripped-back dialogue, returning to family dynamics, failed communication and the uneasy compromises of living together.
He is one half of antidisciplinary art duo Pony Express with artist Loren Kronemyer. The partnership lampoons soft and hard power structures, creating parallel timelines and mirror universes that reflect and refract the challenges of now. Pony Express collaborate across disciplines and species, involving and implicating audiences as colleagues, investors, voters, voyeurs and lovers.
Pony Express works range from sex clubs (Ecosexual Bathhouse) to laboratories (Tentaculum), ships (Raft of the Medusa), showgrounds (The Queer Woodchop), museums as attraction rides (Extreme Forces), galleries as stadiums (Abolish the Olympics), and city halls as geological congresses and battlegrounds (Epoch Wars).
Current playwriting and live art commissions include a stage adaptation of Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals in That Country, produced by Performing Lines WA; the subverted flower competition Workers Arranging Flowers with Superposition Festival, Soft Centre and White Bay Power Station; New New Fire Island, a multi-year property/creative development scheme with Vitalstatistix; librettist and dramaturg for The Castration of Uranus, an experimental opera by composer Solomon Frank commissioned by Sydney Opera House and Performance Space;and Shearing the Rams Too, a collaborative research and training project with sheep shearers and woolpressers.
Image by Joseph Mayers.
