Rick Eckersley: Maverick Consequence

7 - 23 October 2020

Rick Eckersley has occupied a seminal place within the creative industries for many decades.

Renown as an Australian-based garden designer for much of his professional life, Rick’s landscape work has undergone an elemental transition in recent years. A health setback in 2016 laid bare the true depth of Rick’s affinity for the natural landscape and its powerful ability to create and conjure memories, leading to the manifestation of a new body of work entirely removed in application yet instinctually distinguished by the same thread of intent as his gardens.
The repercussion of Rick’s recovery amplified his already well established aesthetic principles for the arrangement of line, form, texture and scale. New constraints on his existing methodology effectively drew a line in the sand, delineating the moment Rick’s artistic pursuits settled into an intriguing new definition which challenges and mediates on human interaction with the natural landscape.

Shifting from a largely horizontal plane to the vertical has been a pragmatic outcome of Rick’s explorations of landscape documentation via the photographic medium. Much as his gardens were informed by a textural and contextual layering, Rick’s mixed medium abstract works have been realised through a journey anchored by experimentation and intentional risk taking.
Working with a diversity of disciplines including photography, collage and digital media to give a visual articulation of one’s cognitive responses to nature, Rick’s professional pivot has resulted in richly stratified works of kaleidoscopic beauty which wholly cement his fortitude as an artist.

Rick’s work is ultimately distinguished by two powerful themes - a gentle response to the natural landscape that sets an autonomy in motion, and a reflection of the consequence of small gestures. These overtures have superbly ricocheted off each and every facet of Rick’s life over time to now emerge through an entirely novel outcome that bears results as resonant as his gardens.

Written by Tiffany Jade; Rick Eckersley photographed by Will Salter.
AUD prices include 10% GST - this is deducted for International purchases. Rick Eckersley prefers this work to be dry mounted and framed in a shadow box frame without glass. For further detail regarding framing and freight please make contact via info@otomys.com. Register here for Art Money to secure your edition and arrange immediate delivery whilst you pay over 10 months interest free: $1400 - $140 per month / $1800 - $180 per month / $2000 - $200 per month.
Rogue: Art of A Garden
To add to his list of achievements, Rick recently had his third book published. Rogue: Art of a Garden published by Uro Books is a book about the art of a mesmerising coastal sculpture garden called Musk Cottage. Musk Cottage is maverick designer Rick's own private garden. It is the culmination of decades of experimentation in Australian landscape gardening and an emphatic expression of the loose, almost painterly approach to landscape design that Eckersley is renowned for.

Rogue: Art of a Garden documents and explores this remarkable Australian landscape and the sensibility that produced it. Much like the garden itself, it is far from orthodox. While evocative photography by Will Salter takes the reader on a journey through the garden’s plantings, textures, spaces and cycles, the book foregoes the typical series of accompanying explanatory essays. Instead, a selection of artworks by Australian artists, created in response to the garden, form richly subjective layers of interpretation.

Short reflections by Rick of his work on the garden, and his learnings from a lifetime spent working within the Australian landscape, round out a publication that strives to capture the spirit of a landscape that has transcended the dogma and conventions of Australian gardening, to become an immersive, total work of art.

WHAT OTHERS THINK..

“[Rogue: Art of a Garden] emphasises what Eckersley calls “the sensory” … the book serves to evoke a mood. It includes not just images of the Musk Cottage garden and the plants it contained but works by a string of artists inspired by the place.” – The Age.

“[Rogue will] take you on a journey through the landscape, as each piece beautifully captures the textures and layers found within the Musk Cottage garden.” – Meanwhile in Melbourne.

Read an extract, Art Guide.

See The Planthunter’s Musk Cottage: Rick Eckersley’s Rogue Garden.

Publisher: Uro Publications 2020, ISBN: 9780648435518, Author: Rick Eckersley, Format: Hardcover, 365mm x 275mm, 258pp.

Rick Eckersley: Maverick Consequence

Rogue: Art of A Garden

WHAT OTHERS THINK..