Working across painting, collage and sculpture, John Baird has developed a bold, flattened aesthetic to examine the interior landscape of domestic life and the slippage between utilitarianism and decoration. With a lingering aura of nostalgia, the comfortable chair, the dressing table or the floral arrangement are elevated from the commonplace, while children play outside in leafy trees and boats are glimpsed on the horizon. By consciously conflating foreground and background, Baird infuses his paintings with a surreality that adds a dream-like dimension to his constructed spaces, spaces in which our memories are enlivened and our imaginations inspired. Baird’s new series of work continues the artist’s engagement with different materials and subjects. Employing paint, wallpaper, fabric and shellac, he creates works that explore a triad of stand-alone subjects – coastal landscapes, the still life and animated figuration. In some of the paintings, Baird draws from the methods of early navigators such as Matthew Flinders, who would make silhouetted sketches of the coastline to be used by anyone at a later date as a navigational tool. The third modality of his show at Arthouse Gallery, Coastal Playground Paintings, are a stylised and mnemonic window into the artist’s childhood via the witnessed behaviour of his own children.
