Common Touch by Melbourne artist Rhys Cousins explores the paradox of human connection in the digital age, where screens mediate much of our tactile experience. Through textured painting reliefs drawn from suburban and manufactured surfaces, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on the erosion—and potential revival—of touch in an increasingly screen-based world.

ARTIST STATEMENT
 

In an era where digital interfaces dominate our interactions, Common Touch examines the paradox of touch in contemporary life, and questions how we connect when the textures of our world are increasingly mediated through screens.

Through a series of tactile painting reliefs and sculptural works, Rhys Cousins explores the shifting boundaries between the physical and the digital. The works incorporate everyday life as surfaces which tie back to suburban landscape texture and aesthetics. Drawing from his ongoing investigations into urban screenscapes, Common Touch interrogates how screens both facilitate and obscure human connection. Tracing interaction, the works evoke the erosion of touch in the digital age, while simultaneously inviting audiences to engage with material surfaces in haptic ways.

Common Touch is both an invitation and a critique—an opportunity to feel, to engage, and to question the evolving nature of human contact in a world where touch is at once omnipresent and increasingly absent.

BIO
 

Rhys Cousins is a multidiscliplinary artist based in Melbourne.
 

Blending a formal education in landscape architecture with works across sculpture, installation, and digital screens. Cousins’ practice is an investigation into the contemporary urban experience through the changing nature of landscape. 

His practice provokes thought about the impact of technology on our everyday lives and the haptic possibilities of an increasingly digital existence. He has been a finalist in numerous art prizes including the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship 2024, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize 2023 and Footscray Art Prize 2023, and was winner of the 2022 emerging artist award at FortyFive Downstairs for his work Pixel, a textural reimagining of screen technologies. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Australia.