Given time, our perceptions can easily change - a single vantage point presents multiple readings - a cluster of reeds shift from messy and untamed towards a delicate elegance.
Throughout 2020 Angus Gardner produced a collection of pencil drawings in his sketchbooks that reference a secluded pond situated in a park nearby his home. These almost daily drawings highlight the immediacy and humble nature of the pencil, moving between obviously appropriated forms to gestural and abstracted strokes. For Angus, they are a meditation on our spatial environment, connection to place, and the way in which we navigate pathways, both physical and psychological. Moving out of the sketchbook and into the studio, the colours and forms of these drawings find their way not only into increasingly sophisticated and larger works on paper but into complex woven physical forms crafted from ceramic.
Royal Park Drawings is as much insight into process as it is a resolved object in itself. The publication allows viewers to engage with otherwise unseen works, as well as offering an opportunity for Angus to realise the potential of work that may otherwise be dismissed as preliminary or unresolved.
56 pages, saddle-stitched softcover, Stray Pages (Melbourne).