Ham Darroch: Harp Frequency

2-31 May

HARP FREQUENCY catalogue of works [PDF]

Ham Darroch’s solo exhibition Harp Frequency presents new works on canvas and paper with a site-responsive wall painting. Darroch is interested in the relationship between art and music, geometry and architecture, drawing upon modernist art history while reflecting on contemporary life. His mastery of syncopated rhythm and quiet harmony in colour and form invokes a profoundly uplifting experience.

Ham Darroch (b.1972) is a contemporary visual artist based in Canberra, Australia. He works across a range of media including painting, sculpture, and performance. He holds a Master of Fine Art from the University of New South Wales (2006) and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) from the Canberra School of Art (1997).

Spanning more than two decades, Darroch’s practice strongly reflects on 20th century modernism and 21st century life, driven by an unwavering intellectual curiosity, rich use of colour and masterful technical ability. His large-scale paintings resonate with the perception of space while his sculptures are created from altered and discarded existing objects, conceptually redirected using optical effects of geometric colour to reveal new meanings, influenced by the vernacular and art history.

Darroch is recognised for his large wall paintings. Since 2015, the artist has realised a number of site-specific wall pieces in Australia, such as Counter Attack (2020). At 12 metres long and 3.5 metres high, Counter Attack is his largest gallery wall painting, produced for the artist’s solo exhibition at Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery in that year. In December 2023 Darroch completed a 96-metre public artwork for the green energy company Neoen Pty Ltd on the Capital Battery Project in Canberra.

Darroch’s recent solo exhibitions include Fairground at Onespace Brisbane (2024), Uplift at Woollahra Gallery Sydney (2024), Kestrel at Benjamin Parsons Gallery United Kingdom (2022), and Propeller at the Drill Hall Gallery ANU (2020). Darroch is part of several notable collections including the Kerry Stokes Collection, Canberra Museum + Gallery, The Kirkland Collection UK, the Brazilian and Columbian Embassies, Bundanon Trust Collection, and the Bridget Riley Art Foundation.

There are several entry points for this exhibition that reference the figure, the proportional nature of the wall painting, objects used to move a human, tools used as a motif and colour that can be interpreted from the harmonic to the sacred.

Accord 2026 wall painting
In Accord gradients of turquoise step in and out of incomplete discs which are enmeshed within a pink rhomboid. At times the turquoise is both in front and behind the pink in a complex spatial situation with the whole wall. The triangular gaps penetrate the surface but also offer a physical echo of the wall itself. The shapes bulge or breathes in places as the viewer moves around the space activated by the brush work and tonal qualities of the colour.

Sideline 4. (Tomorrow night I’m going to bed early) 2022
Oil stick on vintage stretchers, rope and gaff hooks.
This work has a strong physical history, an object created to carry a human now altered to bear a colour weight or parts of a broken colour wheel. The work itself was created with oil sticks, so it also has a reference to touch and a physical action. It’s a double action and then a conversation between two where the concept of rest is important, ‘tomorrow night I’m going to bed early’. The gaff hooks pull colour or possibly are thrown from the stretcher trying to ground itself.

Uccello (Bird 1440) 2026
This painting is about the arrival of a sound or a message and has many layers that slowly reveal themselves from complex geometry to the sacred. A balanced and rebalancing between shifting compositional decisions.

Mantis paintings 2024
Mantis 5 & 8 are multi-directional and more sculptural, open yet entwined. The saw blade motif is surrounded by white, some of their serrations incline erratically outwards and upwards while others hang down trying to wrestle or perhaps grasp, mantis-like, at space.

Harp Frequency 2025
Here the cubit, which is a human measure sets out a rhythm into triangulated pictorial spaces. Within the composition planes of colour are activated, interrupted, reappear and echo as they operate like groups of notes. The title for me speaks to the physical notion of someone playing a harp, reaching into space to strike a note.
— Ham Darroch, May 2026