The Paradise Affect | Adrienne Ranson

Every garden in the Paradise Garden Collection at Hamilton Gardens embodies a path to paradise. Each path to paradise is a desire for happiness embedded in a style of cultural politics and spiritual philosophy specific to a time, a place and people. This desire for happiness is accompanied by a desire for knowledge and wisdom, a need to understand how best to relate to ourselves, each other and our environment. Whether it be a haven for meditation and philosophical study or a place for merely relaxing the body and mind, a garden is suffused with the thoughts of the human minds that have created it, suffused with what the garden designers saw as necessary for happiness and well-being. Similarly my paintings wish to communicate my wish for and understanding of a path to paradise.

My thinking on a path to paradise includes the force of repetition as a performative tool much like performing a script or musical composition. Each time the piece is re-enacted for the viewer it is its own event, pregnant with its own immediacy, its own differences. Any similarities or repetitions are in appearance only, for under scrutiny they lose any sense of mimcry or reproduction, any sense of origin. As a path to paradise, these affects involve interests and life views that emphasise understanding all things as being in a state of flux and change, a result of cause and effect/affect, with no point of origination, being beginingless in nature. These thoughts are combined with the pure and vivid colour of flowers in the sun together with my interest in the structures that controlled the shapes and movements in the Paradise Garden Collection.

By combining my thoughts on a path to paradise with my response to the Paradise Garden Collection, The Paradise Affect is a celebration of the interdependent preciousness of all life melded with my desire to learn to be immediate and mindful in life and living.