Laith McGregor

2019

72 pages
32 x 24 cm
Pubished by Perimeter Editions & STATION
ISBN: 978-0-9876371-1-6

Laith McGregor’s latest publication forges a somewhat unlikely dialogue between the artist’s often divergent processes and aesthetic outcomes. Drawing on two very different but interlinked bodies of work – McGregor’s long-running Island Drawings and more recent Island Collages – the book juxtaposes the Australian artist’s meticulously rendered, monochromatic drawings with his spontaneous, colour-rich and playfully formal collages.

Made in close collaboration with the artist – and published to coincide with a major exhibition at STATION Sydney, in late 2019 – Archipelago skirts a line between artist book and monograph, wrangling McGregor’s works in a loose, intuitive fashion, all the while affording them the critical attention they demand. Featuring an incisive text by prominent Brisbane-based curator and writer Hamish Sawyer, the book sees McGregor continue his at once lively, conceptual, idiosyncratic and methodical explorations of a wider premise that broaches travel, diarism, exoticism, representations of the Pacific and expanded notions of the portrait.