Hidden amongst the dense foliage of the Test Garden, you’ll find a new sculptural installation by artist-in-residence Francis Carmody – a series of works that explore the physical imprint of time on matter, reflecting on research into plants and material form.
Compressions is a new public artwork at Fed Square, and the first public outcome of the Test Garden artist-in-residence program, commissioned by MAP Co with the University of Melbourne.
The work comprises a series of small-scale relief sculptures installed within the Test Garden, which connect ongoing garden experiments and scientific research underway at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley Campus with the garden.
Developed in dialogue with Dr Dean Schrieke’s research from the Plant Trials at Burnley, the works translate his findings and the diversity of the garden’s species into sculptural form.
Each relief is cast and carved from onsite materials including charcoal, beeswax and experimental substrates. These processes collapse geological, botanical and sculptural time scales, folding the logic of growth, pressure and decay into a single surface.
The project mirrors the shared ethos of the artist’s studio and the scientific method, where questioning, experimentation, observation and iteration form parallel ways of understanding the world around us. By bridging these two modes of inquiry, Compressions proposes the Test Garden as both a site and a method for a living experiment in how matter records time.
Francis Carmody (b. 1998, Naarm/ Melbourne) proposes speculative and playful narratives via research-based sculptural scenarios that call upon a wide range of expertise specific to each enquiry. Central to his work to date has been a tracing of networks and natural structures to arrive at propositions of origins and possible future destinations.
His practice spans sculpture and installation. Recent exhibitions include A Relic Remains, Gertrude Glasshouse, The Charge That Binds, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Primavera 2025, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney. He is currently a Test Garden artist-in-residence at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley Campus.
Compressions
Test Garden – Fed Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne
Installation: 6 December 2025 – 31 March 2026
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.fedsquare.com for details.
Images: Installation View of Compressions by Francis Carmody – photos by James Henry