Charles Avery: Selected Works

Charles Avery

Selected Works

Over the course of his career, Charles Avery has dedicated himself to a singular world-building project through the depiction of an imaginary island. Titled The Islanders, Avery has been charting the contours of his imagined Island since 2004, through drawings, paintings, sculptures, texts, and ephemera. A vividly realised fiction, teeming with sights both familiar and uncanny, it also serves as a petri dish in which the artist tests ideas from the fields of epistemology, aesthetics, mathematics, economics, architecture, and beyond. 

Having evolved the Island over almost two decades — constantly expanding its parameters and deepening its textures — he has arrived at a point where he allows his invention to plot its own course, seemingly with its own consciousness, and its own agenda. The Island at the center of Avery's constructed world is located among an archipelago of innumerable constituents. The gateway to the Island is the town of Onomatopoeia, a highly-textured metropolis that bears the hallmarks of an evolving urban landscape. Once the stepping off point for the pioneers who first came, the town experienced rapid transormation from a colonial outpost, to boom town, bustling metropolis, depression-ravaged slum, and finally a regenerated city of culture and tourist destination. The culture and fabric of the Island continue to evolve, further illuminated with each successive work.

Through installation, painting, sculpture and large-scale drawing, Avery's forms become the visual building blocks upon which he promotes aspects of the island's culture. With an aim of fostering views that question the function of collective memory, the taxidermy works and large sculpture featuring containers of blown glass eels and other, more exotic creatures, play with concepts of time, science and temporal continuity in both the real world and the island.

The drawings while assumingly narrative, also emphasise how the characters and objects described in them have projected lives and meanings beyond their role in a particular scene. Perhaps the old woman in blue — entering stage right, exiting stage left — is an eternal harbinger, perpetually ushering in an apocalypse until her hour comes round at last. 

Commenting on the interconnectedness of these objects he states, "I've never really thought of them as multiple means of address. The drawings are something I make. The objects are something I make. They all evince the island. The island I have created represents everything."

Avery’s imaginary realm continually responds ever more directly to the world that we inhabit. Often rendering key elements from his drawings into physical form, sculptures and installations, Avery has said, the Island is "a gymnasium for the imagination and an earnest attempt to align the experience of the viewer with that of the artist." 

Currently Avery has works included in My World, a group exhibition curated by Dutch art critic and curator Hans den Hartog Jager at the Singer Museum, Laren (NL). My World brings together works by international artists that offer a unique insight into some of the most important Dutch private collections of contemporary art. The exhibition is on view until 12 January 2025.

"When visiting Dha of an evening take care as you go, lest you catch ardent lovers well advanced, for Dha is the God of' em. The curves of this strangely familiar form provide an ideal cradel for the passions."

– Description of Dha, in 'The Islanders: An Introduction', Charles Avery, 2008.

In Avery's works Dha is one of the forms of god, a notion of duality, this god sits amongst a selective few that exist in the islanders world in a place he frames as 'The Avenue of Gods'. Dha is depicted as a curvaecous structure, like an inverted number two it follows much of Avery's gods with a lack of set or defining characteristics. 

Avery explains "Before humanity came to the island and created a system to understand this world there were no species, just this continuous gamut of forms." With these forms, Avery emphasises how differing distinct objects and stories can be interconnected in a multitude of ways, with Dha and the god-like entities there is no clear indicative past or narrative progression to them beyond the forms, rather they exist to highlight the idea of received time in our own world, that of a linear, one-directional and eternal sequence. 

For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information,

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