West Civic has a magical new sculpture, Shallows, gifted to the ANU Drill Hall Gallery by the artist James Rogers and art collector Geoffrey Hassall in honour of its recently-retired director, Terence Maloon.

The joint gift is intended to acknowledge the Drill Hall Gallery’s ongoing dedication to abstract sculpture as well as Maloon’s contribution to Australian art.

At an informal gathering in the forecourt of the Drill Hall last Saturday, Rogers threw light on Maloon’s curatorial gift to artists in having articulated their work over a long period of time, both in Sydney and Canberra.

Under Maloon’s watch from 2013, the gallery has turned into a centre for Australian art and a cultural hub for Canberra, even becoming an in-demand location for high quality jazz, vocal and contemporary music.

Likening his sculpture to musical composition, Rogers said, “There’s a disruption of any expected regularity and symmetry … You establish a sense of a developing pattern and then you subvert its regularity … you set up sequences, cadences, currents of incidents almost like notes of music, but you displace the notes.”

Nowadays working out of his studio at Walcha, NSW, Rogers saw himself as “landlocked but linked to the ocean and the sea,” hence the title of Shallows.

Maloon told those present he was proud to have been part of the Drill Hall Gallery and that while his big dream was to have the ANU to erect a purpose-built gallery to house its art collection, what he cared about most was “what was possible.”