Ceramic artist and designer, was born in Manly, NSW, and attended Balgowlah Heights Infants School on the first day it opened. He lived in Balgowlah until his early teenage years and remembers being the escort for the first Miss Manly Mardi Gras in the early 1960s. He studied sculpture and ceramics at East Sydney Technical College and is said to have been the first student to be awarded the new Ceramics Certificate at the 'Tech’ in 1964. His ceramic works are in major galleries, including the Powerhouse Museum and Manly Art Gallery & Museum. He has also worked as a commercial designer. In the late 1950s Alistair McCrea, CEO of the Australian Speedo Company, hired him to revolutionise its men’s leisurewear. His range of Speedo designs (1960-62), largely from the Powerhouse Museum’s archive, was shown in a retrospective at Manly Art Gallery 25 January-2 March 2002, combined with a fashion parade held in conjunction with the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Travis began flying huge kites in the 1970s and constructed them as suspended forms from the early 1980s, e.g. hanging along the nave of St Stephen’s Anglican Church, Newtown, for the first (and only) Sydney Festival of Mediaeval Music and Architecture in 1982 (when Joan Kerr gave the inaugural Blacket Memorial Lecture). From the 1960s onwards he has taught in countless workshops and classes on issues of colour, form and design.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2012
