Skateparks: Trace and Culture by Dan Johnston draws on an extensive photographic study of 136 skateparks across Australia and overseas. Looking beyond the skatepark as simply a place for sport, Johnston documents the visual traces left behind by the people and communities who inhabit these spaces.

Graffiti, stickers, memorials, makeshift alterations and other marks of use reveal stories of creativity, identity, belonging and defiance. Recurring across skateparks from site to site and country to country, these traces suggest a shared visual language within global skating culture.

Johnston’s photographs invite us to read skateparks differently: as places shaped and reshaped by their users, where communities form and young people create a sense of place and ownership. Challenging perceptions of skateparks as marginal or anti-social spaces, the exhibition instead considers their important physical, social and cultural role. 

Skateparks: Trace and Culture presents these spaces as vibrant cultural zones that contribute to connection, expression and wellbeing.