Alex Seton transforms the everyday puffer jacket item into a vessel for contemporary anxieties around protection and truth.
A Person of Substance (Life Size), 2025, scales Alex Seton’s interest in the puffer jacket as a familiar object of contemporary life. Carved in Queensland Pearl marble, the work sets the jacket’s synthetic softness against the weight and permanence of stone. Emerging from Seton’s recent exhibition The Fabulists, the sculpture reflects on the desire for protection and comfort in an age shaped by disinformation, AI-generated imagery and environmental damage. The empty jacket becomes a figure of contradiction: warm and insulating, yet also tied to fast fashion, consumption and the uncertain realities we increasingly move through.
“The puffer jacket is familiar, protective and soft, but it is also bound up with consumption, environmental consequences and the stories we tell ourselves about our own comfort.”
Alex Seton
About the Artist
Alex Seton is a Sydney-based artist known for his expertly carved marble sculptures. His work uses material tension, humour and technical precision to explore ideas of value, authenticity, protection and the social meanings attached to everyday things.
Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf
About Installations
Installations presents ambitious contemporary art throughout Carriageworks, and for the first time, extends into the city. The program of 14 projects features sculpture, textiles, painting, photography, kinetic forms, and public interventions, with works that are generous and immediate but also ask us to look more closely at the social, ecological, and cultural systems shaping our world.
Artists use spectacle, material invention and public address to explore some of the defining questions of contemporary life: how histories inhabit place, how images circulate, how materials carry memory, and how audiences gather, move, participate and reflect. Installations is curated by José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries.
