The annual Sculpture Survey is something to look forward to every autumn. We keep coming back each year not only because it provides a splendid display of 3D art but to note how it evolves and continues to offer new reasons to appreciate the artform.

In the past, the survey has exhibited a plethora of local practitioners along with student efforts while more recently the gallery has been featuring an individual Australian artist while continuing to provide an excellent learning experience to art students.  This year's featured sculptor is the prominent Victorian artist Andrew Rogers while Curtin University of Technology and Edith Cowan University are represented in the student component.

Rogers displays artist's proof bronze marquettes of his monumental, site specific works, along with wall size colour photographs of the originals in situ. This is an excellent way to display commissioned projects that cannot travel. The plinth sized marquettes do not lack any sense of strength when positioned by the photographs, if anything the photos enhance the power of presence of the objects. And we can experience the textural component, view them from all around, and marvel at the intricacy of shapes that seem to teeter or fold or serpentine within and around the whole.

Growth shows red oxidized leaf like shapes fusing with, or growing from, a green patinated folded flat bar that retains a hint of the machine. It suggests a sense of new life, it could be physical or spiritual, emerging from a man made object. The freeform undulations of other exhibits have a decided reference to life forms. For example, Flow and Soar are composed of thick ribbons of bronze sliced halfway through to form ridges on one side while remaining smooth on the other. They are then rippled in a manner that suggest a serpentine form (Flow) and the puffed up chest of a bird (Soar). When seen from another point of view they suggest something different. Fascinating.

Other gallery rooms offer excellent works by Geoffrey Bartlett,  Jon Denaro, Lawrence Dolman, Andrew Kay and R.M. Gomboc to provide an eclectic experience of fine sculpture. Then it's outside to perambulate the grounds and find the students' efforts. This year the numbers are down but the quality of work is decidedly up. Some of the exhibits will not weather the month however others are not so ephemeral and will become a 'fixture' of the park, as have those that remain from past surveys. I quite like Jason A. Skele's Standing Tyred Tree as it's message, and it's form, will no doubt last. So too will the comment made by Kat Polanki's Stairs that reminds us how high aspirations can also lead downward.

This is the twenty-first sculpture survey and it's certainly come of age. We've witnessed it change through the years proving it's always contemporary.