Daniel Wallwork is a Cairns-based artist who was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1975. He works across a range of media, including sculpture, street art, multi-media and illustration.

In 2022, Wallwork was one of three artists awarded a Cairns Art Gallery Artist Fellowship supported by the Cairns RSL Club.

Sunsets and Spinifex brings together works by Wallwork that explore and contextualise the artist’s personal adventures and observations of the landscapes and environs of regional and remote Far North Queensland through which he has travelled much of his adult life.

Wallwork’s early training as an automotive refinisher and spray painter has influenced the choice of materials and techniques that he uses in his arts practice.

Over several decades, Wallwork has mentored children and adults living and growing up in remote Indigenous communities, to explore art as a medium for expression and healing. His aerosol skills have meant he has been a much sought-after artist-in residence, taking him into Cape York communities to run workshops and mural project that ‘help the community tell their stories’.

Sunsets and Spinifex is an artist’s impression of the world seen at 80 kilometres an hour, through the side passenger window of a 4-wheel drive vehicle. Through the heat and humidity, the artist’s journeys often take him on rough dirt tracks, to the dusty destination of a workers ‘donga’ in a remote community, where, at the end of the day, there’s little else than sunsets and spinifex.

On these trips Wallwork is often a lone occupant in the car for days at a time, giving him time for extensive reflection and observation. Perhaps for this reason it is not surprising that humour and a sense of the absurd are evident in much of Wallwork’s work, even though many of the issues he addresses in his works are anything but light-hearted.