Andrew Cooks

My current body of work, imagining the Garden, examines space using the model of the garden.

The Pleasure Garden is a real and an imagined place, a theatre of culture. It is both nature and artifice. Gardens are also investigations of depth and incite motion. As I move through a garden it is in an ongoing state of becoming; my experience unfolds in time.

A character, a flâneur, strolls through an imagined garden, a place of wonders meant to charm. The various compositions move the viewer through this enchanted place, pausing to inspect the many details – patterns distort, recede in space, fountain plumes are at play, flowers hover, images efface other images, figures dance, promenade, sit.

Taking a dynamic, Baroque approach to space, my work explores this invitation to movement by layering and weaving complex fictional spaces using garden designs, pattern, decoration and texture to create and deny space.

I use scale discrepancy as a further invitation to movement – making mural-size works that also ask to be read as miniatures, bringing the viewer to and from the surface.

As the eye explores convoluted pictorial spaces in ‘real time’, I play with ideas of past, present & future through the pictorial space of the image; the space ‘in’ the picture, flatness and a space projecting ‘outward’, into the viewer’s space. This is achieved by employing a wide variety of marking systems to enhance illusions of plausible space, trompe l’oeil and flatness.

Finally, I include figures at leisure to conjure the flâneur in this ‘imagined garden’. Together with text from poetry and prose, place names are added as a way to provoke further connective layers of meaning.

Time takes hold. Making images in a state of flux, I aim to provoke memory; a slipping between remembering and forgetting.