Dan Auluk
Dan Auluk (b. 1970, Birmingham, UK) is a British-South Asian artist born, living and working in Birmingham. He graduated with an MA in Fine Art from The School Of Art, Birmingham City University, in 2014. His practice moves between the personal, collaborative, and experimental; with ways of making and displaying and exploring how his lived experiences are shaped, shared, and re-distributed online and in-person. His works predominately across digital painting, drawing and video, and interested in the tension between private emotional states and their public expression.
“Since 2020, there is a greater focus on research, around self-compassion; how self-kindness, shared experiences, and mindfulness play a role in our emotional health and wellbeing. Creativity has always been a way for me to take care of myself by connecting to self, others, my lived experiences of trauma and anxiety; and a way to be kinder to myself. My artworks emerge from my internal experiences of anxiety of anticipatory grief and fears of loss, using image-making as a way of healing and processing. Alongside this, I develop collaborative projects that create situations for connection, where meaning is produced collectively through participation and exchange, to reduce types of isolation and authorship by responding to a common theme. These projects often function as live encounters, questioning how intimacy and communication is performed, witnessed, and negotiated.
Across these approaches, I am concerned with how images and experiences shift as they move between the personal and social, blurring boundaries between self and other, original and copy, presence and projection.”
Lived Experience
I have 25 years experience of working with and for LGBTQ+ people and communities around emotional health and wellbeing support, from 121 mentoring and wellbeing sessions, group facilitation, training and workshops to reduce isolation and loneliness; in the charity sector, NHS and Universities.
