STATEMENT:
Through this body of paintings, Peter Brook begins to explore the space where urban and rural, human-made and natural, synthetic and organic meet. Brook encounters this space on a daily basis living on the northeastern edge of Melbourne; the hard edges and surfaces of buildings, cars and other elements of the urban environment constantly meeting, hiding, covering, as well as revealing the landscape.

Fragments pears back the pictorial plane, abstracting the landscape and reducing the notions of landscape to drawn lines. Old, weathered fragments of branches, trees and roots are the basis for these line notations, which begin to resemble simplified aerial views of the landscape, both real and imagined. Brook has then fragmented our experience of this landscape notation, disrupting and channeling the flow of what we see beneath, as happens when human-made and natural environments coexist.

July 2019