Texta lids, abandoned shopping lists, a restaurant napkin, archived fingernail clippings and Easter egg wrappers have all found their way into Peter Atkins’ Brunswick journal: part 4, a visual diary of the artist’s experiences in Melbourne in 2002.

Atkins has a passion for travelling and collecting. In the late 1980s he began travelling and composing visual journals of his meandering. These journals are powerful distillations of his personal and cultural encounters, comprised mostly of non-precious found objects, each journal series is a carefully re-presented formal arrangement of objects. For Atkins, the physical stuff, the form and materiality of the banal mass-produced object and the context and significance of the artist’s encounter with that object, holds intense power and fascination. Repetitions of line, colour and form render the familiar strange, beautiful and often humorous. These small, square formatted works reveal the artist’s absorption in the everyday as a never-ending source of inspiration.