The Colour Of Dreams, The Shape Of Memory is Ben Crawford's sixth solo exhibition with us at Boom. This is a substantial body of work and the culmination of more than a year's worth of dedicated and focused studio practice.

Ben has poured his heart and soul into the work and it shows - each painting is alive and vibrant with a celebration of colour, washes and marks. Layers are built up creating a sense of history and depth to each surface. Poetic storylines and hidden narratives are carefully balanced in the paintings, they reveal themselves subtly in the tangle of dreams, memory and reality.

Ben Crawford has established himself as an important visual artist living and working in Australia. His work is enthusiastically celebrated and collected. The Colour Of Dreams, The Shape Of Memory is a major exhibition for 2026 and will be exhibited across both of our main galleries.

We are very excited to host and share this important body of artwork.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"One of the first paintings I made this year centres on Wollumbin, or Mount Warning, a mountain near where I live. Its image has been seared into my subconscious ever since I first glimpsed it eighteen years ago, travelling along the winding road to the farm where my wife grew up. The mountain has cropped up as a motif in my paintings many times over the years, each time an attempt to convey something of that initial encounter with its monolithic profile.

I think this exemplifies what fuels my painting practice: the possibility of communicating something as intangible as the colour of dreams or the shape of memory — liminal, undefinable, layered and highly subjective experiences.

The process of making this body of work mirrored the shifting nature of dreams and memory. The canvases are built up with textured gesso, beneath which lie buried, abandoned images — traces of ideas and decisions that came and went, were erased or built upon — lending the works the quality of palimpsests.

Alongside the paintings, I also wrote poetry exploring similar themes. Writing fed into painting and vice versa, further blurring the already hazy boundaries between memory, dreams and reality."

THE COLOUR OF DREAMS, THE SHAPE OF MEMORY

(Tír Targíre)

That impossible peninsula— 

where once we were wild 

—a landscape of rabbit holes and kryptonite 

of abandoned, bent, and twisted shopping trolley cages 

of horses with dubious provenance, grazing beneath washing lines 

and siren songs sounding 

on the afterglow of burnt-out horizons

Three hundred years have gone by 

Now 

I am tethered to unfamiliar soil 

Nothing remains except 

a hidden dance 

tangled in the undergrowth of that place 

a step in quarter-time 

and music 

the colour of dreams 

the shape of memory


BIO
 

Ben Crawford was born in Cork in the south of Ireland in 1983.
 

Growing up, Ben was fortunate to always have a big garden to play in and later on, a wild coastal landscape to explore. He has no doubt that this exposure at an early stage to the landscape has had an influence on his enduring interest in exploring it in his art practice.
 

He also credits his love of storytelling and appreciation for colour and pattern to his parents, who provided a nurturing environment where art, music, food and reading was part of everyday life. After finishing his degree in fine art in 2007, Ben exhibited with a few Irish galleries, including his first solo show in Cork city in 2008.
 

But it wasn’t until he came to live with his wife’s family in Australia in 2011, that Ben started to pursue art as a feasible career. Initially working from a tiny old food trailer, Ben has slowly developed his painting practice over the past thirteen years, eventually building the studio he currently works from out of an old shipping container.
 

Since graduating from art college, Ben has exhibited widely in Ireland, the UK and in Australia, and has had work selected for various art prizes.