Ignite Studios Artist Residency  |  May - June 2025

Rhys Cousins is a Melbourne-based artist who brings a landscape sensibility to an arts practice working across painting, sculpture, installation, and digital screens. Cousins’ practice delves into the phenomenology of landscape, through process as a driving enquiry into qualities of diversity, change, and variation. He has been a finalist in the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, 2024 and has been a finalist in numerous art prizes including the Sunshine Coast Art Prize 2023 and Footscray Art Prize 2023, and has exhibited in solo and group shows across Australia. 

Rhys is a practice-based PhD candidate in the School of Design at RMIT University establishing a practice towards an amalgamation of screen technology and the urban landscape.

During the residency at Ignite Studios, Rhys advanced his project titled "The Leading Hand," a series of sculptural and painting works that serve as companions to his ongoing "Screenscapes" series. This body of work delves into the transformative impact of screen technology, focusing on the thresholds where screens blur into landscapes, examining the evolving relationship between physical and digital realities. The residency provided dedicated time and space to experiment with mediums such as plaster, concrete, pigments, and mixed media, including digital technologies like television screens, through techniques of assemblage and casting. This focused period was instrumental in refining the conceptual and material aspects of the sculptures, contributing significantly to both Rhys' professional development and the successful realisation of his exhibition “The Leading Hand,” at Lone Goat Gallery, Byron Bay in June to July 2025.