Alan Constable

b. 1956 · Melbourne, Australia

Legally blind and deaf, Alan Constable studies a camera by holding it almost to his eyes, learning it by touch, then rebuilds it in clay from memory, fingerprints and all.

The life

Constable was born in Melbourne in 1956 and has worked since 1991 from his studio at Arts Project Australia in Northcote, an organisation supporting artists with intellectual disabilities. He had no formal training, picking up materials and informal mentorship in the studio, and in 2007 he began the ceramic camera series that made his name. In 2014 the National Gallery of Victoria acquired thirteen of his works and showed him in Melbourne Now, and his ceramics have since travelled as far as Kunsthal Rotterdam and The Museum of Everything.

The work

Ceramic cameras, binoculars, telescopes and projectors, worked up from tactile study of Leicas, Canons and Rolleiflexes, then glazed in bright, wet-finish colours that keep every fingerprint. He is also a painter and draughtsman who reworks found images. His work is held by the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery and The Museum of Everything in London.

Why we love them

Machines built for perfect seeing, remade by hand and by touch. The fingerprints stay in the glaze, and they are the whole point.

Go deeper

• Alan Constable at the Outsider Art Fair
• Alan Constable on Wikipedia
• Arts Project Australia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

← Back to the field guide