Design and Art Australia Online

Paul Fairweather, architect, designer, painter, installation artist and Director of Fairweather Proberts Architects Pty Ltd, was born in 1959 in Townsville, Queensland. There he spent most of his childhood until the age of twelve when the family moved to Brisbane. Fairweather and his four siblings were brought up in an artistic environment where his mother enjoyed needlework and other crafts and his father, upon retirement from engineering, enthusiastically embraced oil painting. Fairweather’s architectural projects and artworks both epitomise his strong interest in the arts. Indeed the artist feels the making and expressive features of art came to inform his approach to architecture.

In 1979 Fairweather began working in various architectural offices – ETS consultants, Griffith University Building and Grounds, John Dimitriou Architects, John Grauf Builder, and Department of Works – while studying part-time at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1987, and established Paul Fairweather Architects in 1991. In 1996, he merged with Liam Proberts Architects to form Fairweather Proberts Architects (FPA). The practice has produced an extensive range of architectural, interior, residential, commercial and memorial projects. FPA has won numerous industry awards and architecture design competitions including sixteen Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) national and state awards, and 1st Prize in the National Police Memorial Design Competition (2005). Indeed the National Police Memorial (2006, Canberra) also won the RAIA Urban Design Award (2007) and Art and Architecture Award (2007) and the Design Institute of Australia Gold Award for Built Environment (2008).

Fairweather began painting in 1990 and, with annual solo exhibitions since that time, is an active artist. His early interest in painting, often making use of an isolated object to explore colour, fluidity, light and shade, evolved to more complex investigations of emotion and meaning. This shift occurred with his 2001 Archibald Prize entry, Exhibitors of Exuberance, when he had to grapple with the demands of portraiture as well as material and surface. With a newfound interest in the present time and what he refers to as 'momentums of society’, Fairweather seeks to capture his own feelings as well as those of his subject.

Fairweather’s command of space in public art projects shows the extent to which his practice straddles architecture and art. Light Installation (2006) uses oversized bright orange witches hats in a star formation to bring new vigour to an industrial warehouse adjacent to the rapidly gentrifying river front of West End, Brisbane. So too, his design is indebted to his art; Fairweather’s whimsical chair designs, especially the playful Mr Curley, and the intricate WWW (Web We Weave) chair (manufactured by Paul Hickey), reveal a degree of experimentation and fun which can be associated with much of his painting.

The Fairweather Proberts Prize for Art, awarded annually to children in Catholic primary schools in the Brisbane archdiocese, seeks to award individuals or groups for excellence in art and design application.

Writers:

De Lorenzo, Dr Catherine Note:
Malouf, Christopher Paul Note: Architectural Studies student, Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW.

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed