Ornament +Fold series

In _Ornament and the Fold_, McGrath draws on a personal imprint—a Jeffrey Smart mural once hung in his childhood home—and distills it into a poetic inquiry of visual compression. The work stages the collapse of perspectival depth into a baroque surface logic, where midground is eradicated and all drama is absorbed into layered folds and adorned fabric. The flattened foreground is not absence but accumulation: ornament becomes space, and structure is remade through embellishment. As with much of McGrath’s practice, this work disrupts the stability of classical perspective and instead revels in its undoing. The spatial void left by the absent midground is filled with theatrical drapery and sensual surface—echoes of Baroque ceiling frescoes, mirrored rooms, and digital simulation. The result is a work that hovers between architecture and textile, between stillness and motion, memory and invention.