Sculpture launch – James Rogers: Shallows

Join us to celebrate the remarkable gift to the ANU of James Rogers sculpture Shallows, recently installed in the Drill Hall Gallery forecourt.  The joint gift of Shallows, by sculptor James Rogers and respected art collector Geoffrey Hassall OAM, acknowledges the Drill Hall Gallery’s ongoing dedication to abstract sculpture and celebrates retired Drill Hall Gallery Director Terence Maloon’s resounding contribution to Australian art.

…there’s melody and counterpoint, movement and structure, syncopation and uncluttered flow… The open-endedness and fluidity of the process is like a track in the water. I want the sculptures to turn, the energy to run through them, to make the eye restless and the viewer move. – James Rogers

The correlation between music and the ocean is alive in the work of James Rogers. The evanescent force of both, their fluxing permanence, captured in the traditional bump and hallow of sculpture. In Shallows 2016 it is the curving ribbons of steel pipe that lend the work their dip and swell. Here the magic of the welder’s wand transforms hard, industrial steel into a fluid symphony of natural forms. In the alchemical process any musical regularity is offset, replaced by a dynamic symmetry found in nature. The play between rhythm and irregularity in Rogers’ work has been noted by esteemed curator Terence Maloon, in whose honour Shallows has been gifted to the Australian National University. “There’s a disruption of any expected regularity and symmetry … You establish a sense of a developing pattern and then you subvert its regularity … you set up sequences, cadences, currents of incidents almost like notes of music, but you displace the notes.”

The Aristotelian belief – that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – epitomised the culture of the Drill Hall Gallery under Maloon’s directorship. Since Maloon’s commencement in 2013 the gallery has blossomed into a cultural hub for Canberra and a seminal institution for Australian art. Filling the gap left by larger national and state galleries, the Drill Hall Gallery champions artists and modes of work that may otherwise go unnoticed, and in doing so gives nuance to the broader understanding of Australian art. This vital role is recognised by curators, critics, historians, collectors and artists alike.

Image: James Rogers, Shallows (detail), 2016, waxed steel, installed in the forecourt of the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2024. Photo: Oscar Capezio.