It's a midweek afternoon. Archy and I sit down on a bench inside Schmick Contemporary, which sits above one of the more chaotic stretches of footpath in the city. Around us is a park he's built inside the gallery, the kind you might sit in to pass some time. The thing I notice, before the bench or the bird fountain or the rubble, is how peaceful it is.
If you've ever paused to watch a weed break through concrete, you share the same observational quality Archy Obradović has. That same sense of observation runs through Peace of a Park, where he has curated the space as a small, worn city park with work by Paige Labuda, Luca Blasonato and Grace Harré. Through our conversation, we touched on why a good park is worn in, metamorphosis of , and what learning to be at peace means. I had always thought of peace as a form of settling. After sitting on that bench with Archy, I think it might be more like a weed through a crack in the concrete. It doesn't ask anything of the pavement. It just grows, and lets the pavement exist around it.
ATIA Let’s start with you. Tell me about yourself and your connection to parks.
ARCHY I'm an artist. I’m mostly a painter, but I'm also interested in space, and how a whole space can be occupied, turned into something like a painting without you being in it yourself. I guess that's what this show is about. I grew up on the Central Coast, very much in love with nature and the world around me. I guess that's my connection to parks, I just like nature.
ATIA The title of the show is Peace of a Park. Can you tell me a little bit more about where the title came from and what it means to you?
ARCHY I wrote a poem a few months ago. I was feeling a bit existential, a little angry about things going on in the world, this sense of hopelessness. The poem was about peace to all things: peace to nature, peace to cigarette smoke, peace to concrete, peace to everything, including the negative in my life. It was a way to find balance in the moment. I'd also been really interested in transient spaces, train stations, supermarkets, these sorts of heterotopias, and public parks. I'd had this idea for a while, putting a show on in one of these spaces I'm in love with. I wanted to create a rundown, small city park, and to build on that idea of peace. Peace to things within things too. The concrete and the plants connecting in the space, the plants surrounding and making the broken concrete beautiful. But the works are also commenting on that. They all have this fleeting sense, this movement, even though they're quite different materially.
ATIA I noticed the exhibition isn’t really interested in the park as a destination, more so what happens between the things in one. What drew you to the concept of a park as a framework for this exhibition?
ARCHY A park, for me, is always such a nice balance between the natural world and the human-made world. In a lot of the parks I've been to, there are objects that have moss grown over them, a chair worn away from so many people sitting on it, pavement with cracks where tree roots are growing through. It's a memory of what has been in the park, what once was. But it's also this beautiful signifier that nature will inevitably grow through what's made by us. That's why the concept of a park was such a big inspiration for me.
ATIA Sitting here, I can see that wear, erosion, and growth that you just spoke about. To me these read as elements of transformation. Does this idea sit within the exhibition?
ARCHY Things inevitably transform throughout life, whether you want them to or not. Transformation is a confusing word for me though; maybe change is better, or the idea that one thing can also be another thing, nothing is just one thing. One of my biggest inspirations is Ovid's Metamorphoses, for things to metamorphosise is to change and become something else entirely. The pavement starts cracking, becomes rubble, and the rubble becomes something else. Maybe landfill, or in this case, something more like a poetic object. The purpose changes.
ATIA So maybe less about transformation, more about metamorphosis. A park as a place to remind us of our capacity to metamorphosise, just like the things in it.
ARCHY Yeah, I like that.
ATIA Bringing together Paige, Luca and Grace, what conversations emerged once their work was in the same room?
ARCHY What has jumped out at me is how different the works are, and how well they still complement each other. There is hardness and softness to each of their works, that is the core conversation.
ATIA Kind of like the park itself. The hardness of the structures built, with the softness of nature.
ATIA I feel like we all have parks that are special to us. Are there any particular parks you were thinking about while putting this together?
ARCHY There's one park in New York I couldn't stop thinking about. It was so busy, so worn down. I felt like I'd seen it before somewhere, maybe in a film, though I can't place it. Hyde Park, where the fountain is, is another big one. It feels very familiar, even though I haven't spent that much time there. There's some memory that sticks with me, maybe from walking through as a kid. And Enmore Park, for the playground, they had this old rocketship you could climb on. The memories made there were incredible. There's a park in Pretty Beach too, where I grew up, that's quite iconic for me. So many memories playing in parks, hanging out with friends, catching up, being overseas by myself and not knowing where to go, so just going and sitting in a park. That's the easiest, nicest thing I could imagine doing. Sitting there by myself. Or with someone. Listening to music, reading, watching people go by. It's quite beautiful. Quite romantic, really.
ATIA Sitting in a park really does have such a romantic feeling to it. But sometimes we’re the people going by, walking through parks without really noticing we’re in one. What's something you have noticed recently, that you'd overlooked before?
ARCHY I've started noticing how many new parks there are, and how empty they feel, how unapproachable. The materials seem like they need some wearing in. I think councils need to hire people to just rough it all up a bit, throw some native grass seed everywhere, make it more interesting. They're just a little too refined. Maybe it's because they haven't had the time yet to have that conversation with nature, to actually get broken in. And parks hold so much memory. What is a park without memory, really?
ATIA One last question. If Peace of a Park was a song, what would it be?
ARCHY Rivers of Another Town by Jonatan Leandoer96. It's a particular feeling, a bit melancholy but upbeat at the same time. I found it sitting in a park in London, by myself, and it made me feel at home somehow. Rivers of another town, I was in a park of another town. It's also a nice song.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peace of a Park by Archy Obradović, opens at Schmick Contemporary on 10 September 2026 and continues until 3 October 2026. The exhibition features work by Paige Labuda, Luca Blasonato, and Grace Harré, with poems written for the exhibition by Quỳnh Anh, Tony Bontana, and Mia McCall.
Words by Words by Atia Rahim, Photography by Atia Rahim