Gardening

Gardening is the culmination of a project responding to the unceded, colonised site of Hyde Park on Gadigal land. As a place repeatedly altered over time, the park has become a staged, faux-natural environment in the city's centre. Joel Arthur's practice examines the aesthetic connection between painting and gardening, seeking alternatives to embedded colonial legacies within landscape traditions. Painted from assembled still-life constructions, the remodelled scenes of Hyde Park amplify how landscape dissects, selects, and arranges landforms for an aesthetic experience. By engaging with the garden and exaggerating the artifice, these counter-landscapes reconfigure perspectives of mediated, landscaped terrain.