James Rogers’ practice exists at the intersection of materiality and emotion, where the raw energy of his sculptural forms meets a deep, meditative stillness. In Burgeon, Rogers continues his exploration of tension and balance, transforming industrial materials into objects that pulse with a quiet, poetic intensity. His practice is one of refinement and reinvention—where surfaces bear the weight of time, yet the composition remains thoroughly contemporary. The exhibition invites us to consider the space between fragility and permanence. This is Rogers at his most compelling: thoughtful, bold, and profoundly resonant.

 

Recent thoughts about sculpture from shared conversations between artists, Nameer Davis and James Rogers:

"If one is going to talk about sculpture, sooner or later you are going to implicate body language and muscle tone in discussion of the realisations, for free standing work inhabits, by way of material and mass, an air space common to both work and viewer.

In a recent sculpture, Spirit on the Water, Rogers’ 20th outing at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, the elements are so light and floating while embracing a trace of the gesture that placed them. A hovering quality, unmoored but positioned haptically. An atmospheric that invokes the phenomenon ‘matterlightblooming’, as described by George Saunders.

It is a different tissue from the exploited steel that the sculpture is wrought from. The connect between shape and space is complete not just by welding, but in a relational and material light. A sense of the body discovering itself in a ‘situation’, stilled in a racing moment in which intelligibility requires integrating object and other. If it’s a unity, it is not a picture to be looked at, rather the outcome of attention. A neural path specific to itself. A model? A representation? If so, not one for reference but one created as a stand-in, a make-do in an unfolding predicament.

In Rogers’ words, the ‘situation’ arrives with pipe, steel pipe. 'Pipe is nature. Cut pipe embodies equivalence. Strip pipe has our insides and outsides exposed simultaneously. Time is unwound.’ With the grisly business of flensing concluded, the idea is revealed in stark clarity, the seed of continuity is sown. The hot blooded engagement in the hunt for air and space ensues. Minutes turn into hours turn into days and sometimes months.

‘You have nothing. No effort rewards try what you may. Nothing new added. Despite yourself, there comes an invisible last intention. The notification comes through, the buckle in time. Space has arrived. You took a second look at tomorrow. Put down the tool.’

In the words of Chinese philosopher Chang Tzu,...’words are like waves acted on by the wind’. An appropriate metaphor for an artist who’s pre-occupations with nature dwells mostly one hundred metres either side of the shore line. A paradoxical conflict exists here in the ceaseless cycle of the tides and the stoic journeyman’s investment in stilled, expansive matter. But this is the pact, the cycle of finding substance and moving on. The imprint of the past and the possibilities of a future, mediated in a solely material state for a present and human grace.

The outcomes here, accumulated over the recent years, cohere from the affiliation to a personal process. The ‘plastic’ phenomenon of metal work unearths structures that explicitly focus the effort of making, until the turbulence of reckoning is spent of energy. If the sculpture survives the scrutiny of the harsh light of day, you breathe the shared air of co-existence."