The long-term personal and professional relationship between Colleen Ahern, Amanda Marburg and Lisa Radford, was the impetus to offer the group a platform to explore and expose the dynamics of their practices.

The 18th-century painter, Thomas Gainsborough, used broccoli in his landscape models, and the three artists have taken this idea as a starting point for interpreting and incorporating broccoli into their artworks. Individually, they each maintain a deep curiosity in the circularity of ideas and are passionate about all art, whether it be old or new, high or low. Consequently, the opportunity for broccoli to encapsulate these concerns while still allowing space for artworks that are stimulated by humour and absurdity appealed to the artists.

Ahern’s paintings engage primarily with visible remnants of the music industry. Her prolific, durational series in which she re-paints album cover art within the listening time of the record, practically has a cult following of its own. For this exhibition, Ahern has expanded her musical suite of references by inserting or rearranging broccoli into a myriad of personal and pop culture imagery.

Marburg is known for her colourful paintings created from photographs featuring plasticine characters in surreal landscapes and the paintings in for you broccoli, undergo a similar methodology. This time, they begin with Marburg (re)making in clay, Staffordshire pottery figurines that feature broccoli amongst other things. Her creative translations amplify the charm and strangeness of the original ornaments. The finished paintings command wonder as the smoothness of the painted surfaces defy the depth and form they portray.

Radford employs a broad range of mediums and methods in her research-based, organisational and collegial practice. Building upon this foundation, she overlays an intuitive, cryptic logic to reveal connections, construct narratives and engender dialogue. In for you broccoli, she has written a play – using ready-made words – based on a trajectory of artists that have used broccoli in their work and subsequently created paintings from this text.