Artist Profile

Unlike a lot of modern artists, I think medium and message are inextricably linked. Traditional materials - stone, metals, wood, clay - allow us to make marks in the environment that become part of the landscape. Once trained as an archaeologist, I find that longevity and slow reversion to dust to be part of the point. And as a practicing anthropologist, I think attempts by contemporary artists to escape cultural traditions are entirely illusory; we are mere flotsam and jetsam in the seas of cultural and biological evolution and geological change. Here are my little marks in that ocean.

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Stephen Levinson was educated at Cambridge and the University of California (Berkeley), and has worked at Cambridge, Stanford, ANU and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He has written over 300 books and scientific articles, holds an honorary PhD from Uppsala, and is fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, and Australian Academy of Humanities.