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. The picturesque park now serves the public’s free use, whether as an urban sanctuary where people can sunbathe, find a shady spot on their lunch break, or leisurely stroll by colonial monuments. Contradicting these freedoms, however, the preserved landscape cultivated on dedicated Crown Land maintains a colonised space that both results from and symbolises a disavowal of Indigenous sovereignties.

Perceiving paradoxes in the urban park, Joel Arthur’s practice seeks alternatives to embedded colonial legacies within landscape traditions by examining the aesthetic connection between painting and gardening. While certain orthodoxies imitate parts of the non-human world to appear natural, landscape, as a cultural construction, can veil imperialist operations. Seeking incompatibilities with conventional landscape, a visual vocabulary of staging and interruption complicates the eased absorption of an image. 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 instead reconfigure perspectives of mediated, landscaped terrain that is aestheticised property. 

Joel Arthur
Gardening