Biography

Lachlan Stonehouse (b. 1999, Australia) is an abstract painter whose practice explores colour, repetition and the structures through which a painting is constructed. Working with sewn and fabricated supports, Stonehouse builds paintings from strips of linen and other textiles, using the grid as a flexible scaffold through which colour, material and form can be organised and reconfigured. Rather than treating the grid as a fixed or neutral structure, he approaches it as something provisional and unstable — a system capable of shifting, loosening and falling away.

Repeated bands, stitched intersections and irregular shifts establish a visual and material logic that is continually interrupted by variations in colour, spacing and construction. Colour develops relationally through this process, with individual passages responding to those around them and small differences accumulating across the surface. Order and instability exist alongside one another, allowing the logic of the work to remain visible without becoming entirely predetermined.

The physical construction of the support remains equally present. Seams, edges, openings, eyelets, fastenings and exposed structures become part of the image rather than disappearing behind it. Frames and other methods of attachment extend this process beyond the painted surface, drawing attention to the ways each work is assembled, supported and held in place. Moving between painting, textile and object, Stonehouse’s works retain a record of the decisions and labour involved in their making.

Stonehouse completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, in 2023. He presented his debut solo exhibition at Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne, in 2024, followed by a two-person presentation with Emma Langridge at Sydney Contemporary later that year.

Stonehouse has exhibited across Australia at galleries including Caves ARI, Blindside ARI, Oigåll Projects, George Paton Gallery, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Arts Project Australia, Sawtooth ARI and Poimena Gallery. In 2021, he received the George Paton Gallery Artist Residency Award, followed by the University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor’s Award of Excellence in 2024. In 2026, he was selected as a finalist for the R & M McGivern Prize.

His work is held in public, corporate and private collections across Australia and New Zealand, including Macquarie Group, Leeuwin Estate, Justin Art House Museum, Winton Group, UMSU and the University of Melbourne. Stonehouse is represented by Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne.