The Garden Room

This exhibition of paintings and ceramic works by Monica and David Usher celebrates the various garden environments that have been an important part of their world over the past 40 years. These new works for The Garden Room are an intimate look at the various spaces we have lived in and shared through all the seasons and adventures of our lives together. The garden becoming an extension of the home, a room outside which offers something more, a ‘garden room’, a space of refuge, solace, meditation, conversation, the company friends and quiet moments in nature.

 These garden environments have included backyards in Brisbane, acreage on the Gold Coast and Toowoomba, each offering their own distinctive charms and structure. They have not been static spaces but rather full of life, aromas and small wonders, each holding its own variety of flora and fauna, most of these living elements having existed long before we arrived and will remain long after we have moved on.

Monica and I have responded to these experiences and memories from different perspectives and methodologies. Monica’s approach is to immerse herself in the environment to observe, make notes and sketches, and to take small cuttings of the flora that are installed in the studio in a vase of water or on a windowsill to allow for further examination. These sketches and notes then become water-colour studies again to be reflected upon and lived with. Eventually, the studies that have resonated over a period of time develop into points of departure for larger works completed in oil. These studies also become the starting point for Monica’s ceramic works. This process involves the throwing of ceramic forms on the wheel that are carefully created with the structure of the flowers, insects and birds found in the garden in mind. These elements directly influencing the shapes of vases, bowls and plates that are being generated.

The desired outcome for Monica’s practice here is to faithfully depict all the natural elements that are being encountered and through these works to convey the feelings and sense of wonderment that being in the garden evokes.

My approach to The Garden Room is to allow the materials of paint and clay provide a platform for mark-making. A lifetime of being in the garden room instils you with a vivid tapestry of memories and related experiences providing a deep well of possibilities for new works. There are other gardens that fill my mind with rich surfaces and shapes, my grandparents’ gardens and the gardens of the houses I knew as a child. All of these significant places hold their own coding and mysteries of childhood to be revisited in the mind’s eye again and again. The works I am creating for this exhibition seek to reveal new layers of memory and forgotten encounters.

The Garden Room is a body of work that invites the viewer to overlay their own garden experiences into the work and perhaps remember something of your own garden journeys.