The art lovers were fascinated by the exhibition of artworks titled "Glory of the Garden" by David Chalmers at Koel gallery, Karachi. David Chalmers Alesworth takes the garden as his key metaphor to probe humanity's culturally specific relationships with the natural world and towards understanding nature more as a social problem.
Elaborating his work he said, "My own hybrid identity as a Pakistani National of British ethnicity tends to inform many aspects of my current practice. Lahore Cantt where I lived for the past decade brought me face to face with British Colonial traces."
The exhibition included antique Kashan carpet with dyed sheep's wool embroidery, tribal carpet with dyed sheep's wool embroidery, giclee print on hahnemuhle rag paper, mixed media on paper, silkscreen and litho prints, oil paint on board, print with paper collage and print with mixed media. These all styles and modes of art serve him well to interpret his feeling about the gardens and society.
The works titled "A Walk in the Woods", "Aliens at Home", and "The Fascination of Flowers" talked about Nature. While works titled "Global Forest, Gingko Globe", "The Machine in the Garden, Bin", and "The Kew Letter" tackle the issues of society.
Currently living in Bristol David Chalmers Alesworth is a sculptor, photographer and researcher of garden histories, working between Pakistan and the United Kingdom. He is former Head of Sculpture, IVS, and Professor, BA (Fine Art), BNU. He is a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and a Stanley Picker Fellowship award holder.
Inspired by Rudyard Kipling's verse:
"Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye..."
David Chalmers worked on the garden based textile such as carpets reflecting the aerial view of Versailles, Hyde Park, Cantt Runner showing the clear map of these sites in detail. "I do not intend the iconic western landscapes as obscuring elements upon the underlying designs, rather I see them as distantly rooted in the fabric of these garden-carpets and growing out of the quintessential landscape beneath and in dialogue with their world view." He said.
He portrayed beautifully botanical taxonomy in an art piece titled "The Garden of Babel". Similarly he stored plants information in his artworks just like in botanical journals in the "Gardening the Archive" series. He save images of not only local specimen of plants as well as alien plants that invade local gardens or were now became part of local gardens because of their certain good properties. Almost all the garden tools were used in his artworks in one way or the other to introduce them to the viewers.