Roland Fraser

Roland Fraser creates artworks inspired by the material they are produced from. He selects raw materials that have an accumulation of surface markings and evidence of human use. The ghost traces from missing locks, hinges and structural joints have a particular resonance for him as they refer to previous incarnations. The completed pieces are a composition of these disparate fragments and his titles often make reference to the places where the raw material was located.

'When I first saw Roland's work, I thought I was looking at a simple composition of lines, colours and spaces. As pleasing as it was to rediscover an old friend making his living as an artist, it didn't really move me. Until I looked closer.

When you examine the pictures, you smack right up against the grain, line and density of different kinds of wood, which is deeply satisfying in itself.

But you also become aware that you are examining the many lives of the wood beyond its function as lumber and the people who shaped those lives; the shades where a carpenter sanded it or where a joiner drove in a hook or a nail to build a cupboard or a door; the wafers of paint or varnish where someone has replaced one colour with another; the wear of decades of daily use; the scratches made by a knife on the surface or even a vandal's initials; splits where the wood has been broken back down into planks; and then the pieces rearranged together, side by side, to make an abstract composition.

In repurposing the wood, Roland draws on the physical trail left by its many lives - tree, lumber, furniture, broken planks, picture - to retell the past. By deconstructing the wood and laying it out again, the layers of meaning emerge. He is recreating a collective and a personal history by rebirthing the wood itself.

In a collage made from the planks of an old Fraser family press, we can see the lines where the cupboard shelves were. We might imagine how his father, as a child, will have stolen a biscuit from that cupboard in his grandparents' house or where his mother, living with her in-laws in the same house, will have taken out crockery daily. Now those pieces of shelving have become a collage in which each piece of wood has its own space and splintered surface. At the same time, the family history is conjured up.

One of the challenges of lockdown is the difficulty of not being able to see this work, except on a screen. Because I am unable to visit the gallery, just thinking about how these ideas slot so perfectly together sparks a kind of yearning to have it before me, in person. Part of the magnetism of these pictures lies in the source of the wood itself; trees are so necessary and familiar to us all in so many ways, the providers of physical comfort through the clean air we breathe as well as the material for the chair I sit in writing this.

Roland's work sparks a journey through these layers of meaning and sensation and somehow, despite distance, draws on that familiarity we share and provides comfort in the same subtle way that trees do.'

Liz O'Leary, 2021