Born in Auckland in 1979, Dylan Lind is of Cook Island and European descent. He graduated from Elam with a BFA in 2001.

After graduating, Lind spent several years travelling and lived for a year in South America before returning to Auckland to become a full-time artist. His first exhibition was in 2005.

 

Lind's puzzle-like work mixes the abstract techniques of the neo-expressionists with the patterns of the traditional Pacific quilts known as tivaevae. In his early work, Lind built scraps of mixed media, including wallpaper, cloth, linoleum and tarpaulin, into kaleidoscopic textured collages of everyday life that draw on the crafts of his cultural heritage. More recently, Lind has refined his work to enamel and acrylic, creating jewel-like geometries of woven colour thick with drips of paint. For Lind, painting is both conceptual, exploring the contrast between the "slow moving soft lines and vibrant colours" of traditional Polynesian arts and the "hard-edged, sometimes uncompromising nature of more developed nations", and tactile, an expression of his pure joy in the physical act of spilling glossy enamel onto a clean canvas.