Beyond Flinders

Beyond Flinders is a collection of works on canvas that examine the connections between garden making, nature, and memory, in response to the former Musk Cottage Garden in Flinders, Victoria. For every weekend over 10 years I made a garden in Flinders, a personal project informed by my experience as a garden designer. For me, Musk Cottage Garden embodied a deep sense of connection to place, and through a process of remembering, has become both collaborator and muse for this body of work. Produced through a methodology of gardening, I am guided by visual elements and principles of line, form, texture and scale, to make visible that which has been lost or overlooked within the organic world. I’m interested in revealing the whole life of plants and gardens and drawing attention to the flux between renewal and decay. I have experimented with paint, glazes, colour and layering of digital imagery, to suggest windows into other worlds that bring forward an interplay between depth and detail. These hybrid spaces are suggested through varying weights and types of paint, and applied through methods of throwing, cutting in, scumbling, spraying, scraping and drawing. The physicality of painting connects me to the memory and act of garden-making, and to the potential of regeneration. Through mark-making, I am defining space, cultivating, and trans-planting open-ended and expansive landscapes, with porous canopies, vistas and caves, which connect me to the memory of Musk Cottage Garden.

‘Series 3, Study I’, Rick Eckersley, 1600 x 1400mm, Acrylic, oil stick, collage on canvas, 2024.