George Savill’s childhood gang, The Frogs, was made up of George, his brother Ben, and three best friends. Inspired by the bike-riding boys in Spielberg’s ‘E.T.’, The Frogs played ‘kick the can’ and ‘go home, stay home’ as they ripped through the urban landscapes and tributary streams of Christchurch’s inner-city Avon River. The greatest prize was a cool glass of milk drunk while standing in someone’s kitchen. When threatened with capture (and punishment of an unimaginable kind), the city gardens and river systems provided the ultimate avenue of escape for Savill and his Frogs.

 

Savill’s latest exhibition borrows its title from British writer Olivia Laing’s ‘The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise’ - a book that investigates the long associations between paradise and earthly gardens, and the complexities of place that a garden can disguise.

 

Savill lives and paints in Tauranga Moana but regularly roams: returning to Christchurch’s Hagley Park; wandering North Canterbury’s Flaxmere Gardens; scouring seascapes and landforms at Waimoana on Wairarapa’s rugged east coast. Titles such as Blue Grove, After the Rain and Behind the Woolshed pull directly from these places, yet Savill inflects a halcyon quality into his fantastical garden worlds. Light-filled moments of transcendence shift between real and imagined places; bridges shimmer as liquid flows across the picture plane beyond and into the frame, conduits - or pathways - between the present day and other worlds, sparking memories of time spent in a garden and our earliest connection to place.

 

Savill digs into a sensory garden-experience, suspending moments of time as he indulges in forest bathing, colour saturations, acidulated dreams, moments of revelry, meditations on light, and looping curlicues - cultivated and wild. 

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