Dr Lycia Trouton is an Australian citizen, was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and grew up in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. She completed her Masters in Sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Thereafter, she spent a decade of her life, mainly in large cities in the USA, as a site-specific (organic minimalist) sculptor of Public Art (including civic and large-scale university campus commissions or community-based work) before coming to Australia for her Doctorate at the University of Wollongong, on scholarship, as well as with an Australian Research Council Research Assistantship. Dr. Trouton has lectured in Darwin, Adelaide and Vancouver, BC, Canada. She has relocated to Launceston for this position.
Trouton’s practice-led research engages in issues of monumentality and, more recently, installations about the art of memory that use the art of textiles as a metaphor for issues about the body, violence, trauma and migration. Her long-term work on The (Irish) Linen Memorial has brought her into a recent concerns with restorative justice and phenomenology. Her sculpture about ecology and climate change has been influenced by her Canadian background. Trouton makes art that engages social, political and environmental concerns. Her time-based work has been written about by the NYC critic Donald Kuspit, Los Angeles historian of feminist-matristic art and women in surrealism: Dr. Gloria Orenstein, Seattle author: Matthew Kangas, Ben Mitchell and Gerry Craig: mid-west USA curators and Dr. Deborah Haynes: scholar of Mikhail Bakhtin's aesthetic theory and former Director of Women's Studies at Washington State University, Pullman, as well as by the A/Director, Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh School of Art, Dr. Jessica Hemmings. Trouton has exhibited large-scale outdoor work at several venues including Albright College and Whitman College, USA and worked with award-winning architects Mary and Ray Johnston of Seattle.
Trouton's scholarly research includes an essay for a the 2007 book, Echoes of Irish Australia: Rebellion to Republic, edited by Jeff Brownrigg, Cheryl Mongan & Richard Reid. ISBN 978-0-980390-0-4. As well, she has contributed to several internationally refereed journals and regularly writes art criticism (published in N. America, Australia and UK), and presents at conferences and produces artist monograms.
Tel: +61 3 6324 4413
Email: lycia.trouton@utas.edu.au
Lecturer in Art Theory.
