Austin Ballard relies on the architecture of textiles to create complex spirited sculptures. Derived from the Rattan Palm, his core material becomes reference to both plant and body. Captivated by the strange and transient nature of botany, mysticism, and augmented reality, Ballard grafts the organic with the automated. His sculptures transform their organic and handicraft nature to create a mysterious uniformity, evocative of a digital reproduction or artificially generated form.
Ballard’s current work revolves around the ‘Roll Cage’ as both a physical and metaphorical device. His work It Never Entered My Mind // Mumbler with Blind Rivets, is the first object in this emerging series. His sculptures slice, rip, and carve slabs of checkered material. Paralleling these shredded gestures with that of a slowly flowering bud, Ballard puts forward an unavoidable tension. Asking if an object can be both a vehicle for speed and silence, architecture for both a coffin and a time machine, or a relic both organic and supernatural? Through intricately patterned sculptures, Ballard overlays the fluid symmetry of nature with the uncontrollable pace at which our engineered lives crash into one another.
At MacDowell, he continued his series of cane webbing sculptures while pioneering a new body of work involving paper, collage, and a taxonomy of the sensory. In the spring of 2026 he will be in residence at Kino Saito in New York.
Portrait by Emma K Rothenberg Ware
