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When InReview catches Alfred Lowe on the phone at the end of a long day in the studio, the award-winning Arrernte artist is feeling contemplative.
He’s just turned 30, his latest solo show A Great and Wondrous Sign opens at Hugo Michell Gallery in three days, and, despite putting the final touches on works with ‘2025’ carved on their base, his calendar is already filling out through 2027.
“It’s about this idea of looking to the future and looking for a sign, really,” he says of the exhibition’s title.
“You know, I’m lucky enough in life to be in a place where the future is really open to me now. It hasn’t always been that way in my life; I’ve spent most of it sort of just surviving, and so now I’m sort of in a better place.”
Just a few years ago Lowe was working in Aboriginal health, having moved down to Adelaide from his home in Snake Well, north of Alice Springs, to study. His parents were both creative people – his mother a visual artist, and dad a musician and actor – but it wasn’t a path he considered for himself.
“Art was huge in my life,” Lowe says of his childhood. “I spent a lot of time around art, especially around the Araluen Art Centre in Alice. It’s funny that I grew up around so much art, and loving so much art, but never really thinking that I was capable of making it.”
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, Lowe and his colleagues in the Aboriginal health sector were tasked with the challenging work of keep the virus out of vulnerable First Nations communities, from the APY Lands to the Northern Territory.
It was, Lowe says understatedly, a “really intense period of time”. By 2021, he had resolved to take some time off and return to studying – only to find himself spending less time at university, and more next door at the old Night Train building on Light Square.
The former theatre restaurant was then home to the APY Art Centre Collective’s Adelaide studio and gallery, where his friend Zaachariaha Fielding was at a similar crossroad after the upheaval of the pandemic.
Once best-known as the powerhouse vocalist of musical duo Electric Fiends, Fielding had followed in his father Robert’s footsteps to embrace visual art.
“All his [music] shows got cancelled because of Covid, so he did a similar thing – of going and giving art a go,” Lowe of Fielding’s pivot.
While Fielding and many of the studio’s other residents created sprawling canvases, Lowe found himself drawn to the medium of clay.
“Staring at the blank canvas I always found super intimidating,” he says. “But with ceramics you sort of get to build your own canvas, you know?
“It just instantly felt right. I sort of ran with it since then.”
Lowe started small, but it didn’t take long for the scale and personality of his work to grow.
“From there it’s just gotten a little bit bigger, a little bit more abstract, a little bit more bold in colour.”
Lowe’s colourful, curvey, and characterful creations – often found skirted with red, blue, or purple raffia, or sporting tufty topknots – soon began drawing attention beyond the studio. In 2023 he was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize for his work Crossing The Lines, repeated again in 2025 for his twin sculptures, You’ve been on my mind, sister. He was also a finalist in the Art Gallery of New South Wale’s Wynne Prize in 2025, and won the 2024 Shelley Simpson Ceramic Prize, and 2025 Rigg Design Prize.
Lowe says the “quite instant and, you know, insane success” that has greeted his work has been a “wild journey”.
“I didn’t come in thinking ‘I’m gonna win the Rigg Prize’, ‘I’m gonna enter the Wynne Prize’,” he says. “I didn’t really know what any of those things were, you know? I just came into it really loving this medium and really loving making work.
“It’s one of the first things in my life that I’ve ever done that I feel really comfortable in and really grounded in.”
Asked about the overseas response to his work – last year’s Milan Design Week saw UK-based Wallpaper* magazine place him among 20 emerging designers featured in its ‘Material Alchemists’ exhibition – Lowe is happy to keep building is practice closer to home.
“I think you know we’re very lucky in Australia to have an art market that cares a lot more about the art than the artist,” he says, citing the tendency of overseas galleries to fixate on an artist’s “five-year sale history” rather than the work.
“I didn’t even have a five-year sale history – because it hadn’t been five years.”
Alfred Lowe: A Great and Wondrous Sign is showing at Hugo Michell Gallery from
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