Antares Iron Art Garden

Situated at the Loddon River Ford at Newstead, Antares Iron Art Garden is an established art and sculpture garden created by Roger McKindley.

Found objects are sited creatively in the space where he lives and works, to form unique and entrancing patterns and images. The whole space is a kind of installation, where visitors are free to roam and explore – finding themselves by turns entertained, beguiled, uplifted and moved.

Roger’s work invites his visitors to engage their sense of play and imagination. He says, “My art can be interpreted and re-interpreted from every angle and in different environments… different seasons. In the changing light, in shadow and full moon or in rain, however you approach the art I make, you will see it change over and over.”

This is a garden in constant flux, as objects are arranged and re-arranged to suit its creator. Nothing is extraneous. Roger finds beauty in all the objects he finds and the things that others discard – he brings these objects together into an enlivened and creative whole.

A qualified landscape gardener of many years’ experience, a stone worker and self-taught artist and sculptor, Roger has over the past 20 years, created Art Gardens wherever he has lived and has participated in numerous community and art events.

Antares is open regularly to the public, during festivals and arts events, on weekends and by appointment. Throughout the year, the garden receives hundreds of visitors, many of whom return again and again, finding inspiration and joy.

Inspired by the natural world, I use found objects – stone, bone, wood, glass…and iron, to create. I love to play with all these materials. I change and reshape them, over and again as I desire. Nothing is fixed.

Reverence is everything. I feel humbled by the objects I find… or is it that they find me?