biography

Kirsty Tinkler (b. 1971, Australia) grew up between Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, an experience that fostered an expansive awareness of cultural histories, shaped by the presence of British colonialism. She completed her undergraduate studies at Sydney’s National Art School in 1999, after which she began producing outdoor, site-specific sculptures, winning grants and awards at the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibit. In 2004, she received the Rosemary Foot travel bursary to attend Art OMI International Artists Residency in upstate New York. In the same year, she realised a site-responsive work outdoors in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

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In 2005 Tinkler relocated to the United Kingdom and completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2009. It was here that questions surrounding her position within colonial histories began to more directly inform her practice. Turning to architecture as both a symbol of civilisation and a projection of empire, she developed works that subtly interrogate the hierarchies embedded within architectural facades.

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Her first solo exhibition, Hoist (2011), was held at the University of Suffolk’s Waterfront Gallery, supported by the Ipswich Art Award. Responding to the port town’s histories of movement and migration, the exhibition featured a wall-based installation of latex reliefs referencing skin-like classical facades. This mode of working, led her to wrap several sites across England in 2013. Creating classical monuments in the temporal skin of latex.

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A visit to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2023 marked a significant shift in her practice, away from the site-responsive, towards a vocabulary of objects as display and artefacts of temporal histories.  She held her most ambitious solo exhibition to date, Vessel at Dalston Pier, London, in 2024. Maritime themes re-emerged through sail-like forms and sculptural paintings, with references to J.M.W. Turner. In Ghiberti’s Choir, a large-scale installation resembling a communal notice board, abstract panels drew on Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise.

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In 2024, Tinkler relocated to Cape Town, where her engagement with materials took on renewed significance. Responding to the weight and implications of materiality within an increasingly saturated material culture, she began working with found and waste materials. In 2025, she participated in the Sessions Studio Programme led by Dominique Edwards, developing a body of small-scale sculptures cast from discarded matter and presented as artefacts.

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In 2026, Tinkler will present her first solo exhibition in South Africa at AVA Gallery in Cape Town, and return to Australia to participate in the Bundanon Residency Programme.