Peter D Cole
Aug 7 - 24, 2025

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"Helen in the Garden"
Exhibition

In his latest exhibition, acclaimed Australian artist Peter D. Cole invites audiences into a reflective, deeply personal meditation on memory. Grounded in a lifetime of artistic practice, this body of work is about making as remembering, and the subtle but significant presence of symbols throughout our lives. While looking backwards and exploring familiar motifs and concepts, the work is grounded in the present, capturing a career in motion and a contemporary sense of self. For Cole, the present represents a liminal space between past and future, scattered with symbols and forms like totems. We are firmly rooted in this in-between, where objects and gestures - however familiar - reveal new meanings when we look again, more closely, more tenderly.

Known for his rigorous sculptural language - where architecture, proportion, and geometry form a quiet but powerful foundation - Peter D. Cole’s new works introduce a softened, more instinctual hand. Sculptural floral forms born from hand-drawn lines emanate a quiet sense of freedom, feeling less graphic, more intuitive. These marks are suggestive of memory itself: sometimes crisp and vivid, other times blurred, half-formed, but no less resonant. As the artist himself reflects, “part of getting older is remembering, you can’t help it.”

The show explores memory not necessarily as nostalgia, but rather as a material process - something made, shaped, and layered. While these new works remain true to the distinctive formal language Cole has developed over decades, they carry quiet evolutions. Echoes of ‘past lives’ and earlier practices flicker through the exhibition. Shapes recur and materials shift. Wood, brass, aluminium, bronze, steel, marble and painted panels - a constellation of solid, enduring substances - anchor the show. Each material has its own weight and density, acquiring a patina that speaks to use, care, and change over time.

Drawing - a practice Cole has always returned to - becomes both a technique and a metaphor: a direct link to the subconscious and to lived experience. There is a lyrical interplay between hand-drawn curves and architectural lines, between looseness and order. This balance is at the heart of Cole’s work. The compositions are pared back, minimal, and meditative. Yet they are never cold. There’s warmth in the forms, a quiet joy in the colours. Primary reds, yellows, and blues - a longstanding motif in Cole’s palette - are joined by softer pastel tones: pinks, greys, forest greens, and powder blues. These hues hark back to the artist’s enduring love of pastel drawing and watercolour painting, where pastels are often used to highlight and add expressive marks. Their soft, chalky density is also expressed in the use of a powder coating method, a new approach for the artist who has previously used yacht paints to colour his pieces - a lingering material connection to his father who was a boat builder.

These colour choices are more than aesthetic. The pastel hues also recall flowers - a recurring motif in this latest show, as well as the last exhibition. Flowers, like memories, are fragile and temporal. They speak to mourning, celebration, connection. To give someone their flowers is to honour them; to grow and pick them daily, as Cole’s wife Helen has done for decades in their Kyneton home, is to make beauty part of life’s rhythm. The flowers here are drawn not just from nature, but from personal ritual - a symbol of care, of place, and the quiet intimacy of daily life. Throughout the exhibition, animal and human figures emerge alongside a bricolage of architectural motifs and landscapes. The humble bee, a recurring character, becomes emblematic. Bees, like artists, are industrious and deeply tied to the natural world. They transform the raw into the refined. From pollen, honey; from memory, meaning. Another connection to flowers but also to sense memory and intuition.

There’s a sacred geometry in flowers too - just as there is in Cole’s forms. Influenced by tantric art from his early years and travels as an artist, geometry expresses both practical reasoning - the orderly logic of craft - as well as layered spiritual meanings, containing divine patterns of the universe. Minimal and clean, these patterns inspire calm contemplation. Rather than complicate, they hone things down to the simplest form and idea, offering the viewer restful and yet energised meditation. Like so many symbols, they connect us to the universe.

This show is not a retrospective, nor a reinvention. It is something else: a reckoning with the present as the meeting point of past and future. A place where making becomes a way to hold time in your hands.

Words by;
Zachary Calleja