Lewis Fidock & Joshua Petherick

Lewis Fidock & Joshua Petherick’s collaborative practice engages in strategies of artifice to consider relationships between objects and time, the organic and synthetic, past and future. Sitting alongside their individual artistic practices, they have developed a body of predominantly sculptural work, at once recognisable but also strange: artworks that disrupt our perception, yet feel familiar. For when in the company of their work, disorientating emotions and sensations are evoked, chiefly played out via this interplay of horror and humour, with abstraction, absurdity, the macabre and surreal also close by. Fidock & Petherick achieve this richness through the traditional artistic foundations of materials and techniques, they are true craftsmen, carefully considering what should be used and how it should be applied to achieve their conceptual goal. Accompanied by a detailed attention to atmosphere, the result is a practice speaking to the real world and its contained ontology, but seemingly coming from a parallel space/place.

Fidock & Petherick both live and work in Melbourne; their work has been exhibited at leading local intuitions, including The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017); and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria (2016). Additional exhibitions featuring their work has taken place at: 1301SW, Melbourne (2024); Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2023); Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2021); Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2020); Sydney, Sydney (2019); First Draft, Sydney (2018); and Minerva, Sydney (2017).