Jim Roche’s A-frame sculptures fuse surfboard shaping and post-minimalist abstraction into sleek, tapering forms. Evoking motion without function, they transform suburban craft into sculptural memory—objects that remember speed, lineage, and loss.

Born in 1989 on the Gold Coast, Melbourne-based Jim Roche’s practice draws from a lineage of surfboard shaping and suburban craft traditions to produce sculptural works that blur the boundaries between object, artifact, and abstraction, sculpture, and painting. His A-frame series, elongated, tapering forms carved from reclaimed poplar and finished with synthetic polymer, ink, and resin, evoke the aerodynamic profiles of stealth bombers, GT stripes from muscle cars, and mid-century industrial design.

The A-frame structures first appeared in Roche’s solo exhibition Van Der Zande (ReadingRoom, Melbourne, 2023). Earlier solo projects include Smile (Savage Garden, Melbourne, 2022), a playful yet rigorous exploration of shaped forms and surface treatments, and Scrambler (Cathedral Cabinet, Melbourne, 2022), which extended his Interest in motion and its sublimation through compact sculptural interventions.

The A-frame works reflect Roche’s ongoing investigation into material memory, biographical inheritance, and the aesthetics of speed and stasis. Roche started making art while recovering from a skateboarding injury. His father is a Gold Coast surfboard shaper. These are the more obvious aesthetic references, but more subtle are the allusions to Roche’s Dutch heritage via clog-shaped curves, and the rich legacy of Melbourne’s vibrant object- based and post-minimalist art – artists like Stieg Persson, Claire Lambe, Juan Dávila and Guy Stuart. Comparisons can be made with Hany Armanious’s exploration of the aura of everyday objects, transforming the banal into the uncanny and sculptural, and Ricky Swallow’s carved wooden facsimiles of vernacular domestic detritus as contemplative artefacts.

Roche’s works are materially and formally faithful to their origins, yet functionally estranged, shaped by artist’s inherited techniques and recontextualised through art-historical filters. The A-frame series operates as both homage and disruption. Roche’s shaping techniques, inherited from his father, are recontextualised through art-historical filters: Ron Nagle’s erotically charged ceramics, Richard Tuttle’s fragmentary constructions, and Dale Hickey’s fences. In that respect, Roche’s works function like carefully calculated corporate logos, but signifying nothing concrete, floating independently of social class or subculture. In that respect they offer a kind of universal touchstone that resonates right around the Pacific Rim.

Once released out into the world the works become liminal blank screens, freed from intention, for the viewer to project whatever fancies or fantasies upon, fluctuating between formal specificity and generality. The tangled network of signs and signifiers inspires conversation. These are not direct visual citations but resonances, invoking what art historian and critic David Homewood calls “aesthetic defamiliarisation”—the transformation of familiar things into near-unrecognisable entities to create a transcendent frisson, refusing to resolve into the known categories of everyday experience. They resist utility, remembering motion and speed but refusing to perform it.

The theoretical framework of Object Oriented Ontology posits that objects exist independently of human perception and have agency. Roche’s sculptures invite consideration of their ontological status as autonomous forms, neither tools nor symbols.

The repeatable formal motif allows for the exploration of the painted surface in a way that suggests comparisons with colour field painting and the delicate chromatic transitions one finds in the mannerist paintings of Jacopo Pontormo. One might also look to the maximalist works of Frank Stella, though Roche avoids Stella’s rejection of expression by leaning into the territory of pop art, the intersecting aestheticisation of commercial design and popular culture. When colour is morphed over form it becomes interesting and comes to life, haptic and tactile. Exploring the pre-linguistic, bodily responses elicited by art, affect theory helps frame Roche’s works as sensorial provocations, objects that evoke memory, motion, and loss without narrative.

Memento mori to modernism. And yet, despite this defamiliarisation, it is impossible to ignore the warm, nostalgic feelings the sculptures bring forth, memories of lazy suburban summers and days at the beach, which Roche nails in his commitment to local materiality and conceptual specificity. They become vessels for mood and feeling. The sculptures can never entirely become abstractions severed from all cultural referents. This aligns with art historian and media theorist Hans Belting’s argument for art history’s continued engagement with cultural traditions, even within globalised frameworks.

The University of Melbourne commissioned Roche to create new work for the 757 Art Project (2019). He has also participated in group exhibitions and collaborative projects, including Ümwelt (Starkwhite, Auckland, 2023), curated by Jonny Niesche, which brought together artists working at the intersection of materiality and perception. Roche’s work has been featured in independent spaces and artist-run initiatives. He also provided artworks for Hoddle Skateboard company. Whether on gallery walls or skateboards, Jim Roche’s work carves out new ground where memory, motion, and material collide.

(Text by Andrew Paul Wood)