The Staging Ground project proposes an exhibition format in which the pieces distributed throughout the space reconfigure the gallery as a laboratory for the outcomes of artistic research. The condition of the artist, the nature of artistic labour, and the manner in which the space of conceiving a work of art influences its content and form become the premises of the inquiry articulated through visual discourse.

Rewriting the idealised interpretation and mythic stature of the artist’s studio, Michael Peppiatt examined the studio not only as a workplace, but also as a theatre (a stage on which the artist performs his world, where the very act of creation takes place), as an incubator (a site of experiment, trial, error, and resumption, where ideas, sketches, and unfinished works are tested), and as an archive (the studio as a repository of all the works, studies, and objects that have mattered to the creative process). In the case of Staging Ground, the studio reconstructed within the gallery’s exhibition space, borrowing and recontextualising objects from the building site, becomes a place of gathering, of encounter prior to an undertaking or initiative. Rather than the title’s military reference, what we encounter here is the artist’s studio as a space of preparation, anticipation, and accumulation, as well as a launch pad for ideas and artistic undertakings.

The artist’s studio evokes the invisible process, the inner studio, the construction site of ideas, while the archival function of the space proposes an understanding of memory as a construction, a form of mental architecture.

Extending earlier artistic concerns relating to the condition of the artist and of artistic labour, as well as to the functions of the environment in the elaboration of visual discourse, the works in this series operate through the instalational properties of each exhibited object, proposing a three-dimensional, spatial reading of the treated surfaces. The construction site within the images extends its reference to the artist’s studio as a space of experiment, of process, of work in progress, while the studio constructs itself both as a visual and mental structure and as an architectural one.

Physical labour and mental effort coexist within a process of visual articulation in which the artistic media employed propose openings, frames within frames, and mutually complement and articulate one another in a space of coincidences and encounters within anti-gravitational fields.