Born in Bendigo in 1931, Ken Unsworth started as a painter but began making sculpture when he was working at Bathurst Teachers College in 1966.  Unsworth has had numerous solo exhibitions, in Australia and overseas, including a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1998. Often bitterly funny, Unsworth’s work mixes light and darkness in ways that keep us off-balance.

His works have been included in the Mildura Sculpture Triennial, 1973 and 1978; the Australian Sculpture Triennial, Melbourne, 1981, 1984 and 1993; and the Biennale of Sydney, 1976, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1990 and 2000. He has also participated in major international exhibitions including the Paris Biennale, 1985; Magiciens de la Terre, Paris, 1989; and the Biennale of Istanbul, Turkey, 1995. In 1978 Unsworth represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. He has received numerous awards including the Bi-centenary Sculpture Competition Award in 1970, and the DAAD Scholarship, Berlin, in 1987. In 1989 he was awarded an Australian Creative Fellowship, and was made a Member of the Order of Australia for service to sculpture. Ken Unsworth lives in Sydney.

Ken Unsworth is a speaker in the panel session Art for laughs: should humor be banned in the art museum? 

ABSTRACT

The Gag

Humour is innate in all of us. If not we would have had to invent it. Humour is a kind of innocence that can fill unspeakable silences. As through the pitch-black of the welder’s lens our unblinking gaze can contest the unstable blinding energy of that pitiless engine of the psyche. The burlesque, the absurd, the wrung-out pitch of irony, all those tools of prickly humour allow us the hope to make a sense of, or make bearable, life’s abundant taste for the ache of heart, of soul, of spirit; for the well-tempered life the ability to juggle flaming coals without injury, but with laughter and tears.