David Alesworth’s work echoes his long engagement with Pakistan as a visual artist, horticultural consultant and an art educator. The idea of the garden as an archival formation across cultures is central to his practice.
In his textile interventions from the last decade, Alesworth does not intend the western iconic landscapes as purely obscuring elements upon the original carpet designs based upon the paradisiacal Charbagh, rather he sees them as distantly rooted in the fabric of these garden-carpets, growing out of the quintessential landscape beneath and in dialogue with their world view.
For LB01, the artist’s audio intervention within the park space speaks with the voices of figures from the park’s history and of the land. Consisting of a series of sound works, hosted within the crowns of some of the garden’s most ancient trees, the work originates in the artist’s on-going research into the history and genesis of Bagh-e-Jinnah.  A facility originally established as a garden of acclimatization during the British Raj, Lawrence Gardens was intended for the grooming of English plants and fruit trees for future cultivation in the newly acquired territories of the British Indian Punjab. The current park has been renamed, and has evolved in various ways but underlying its current manifestation is a Botanical Garden of the British Empire, complete with all its implied certainties, complexities, contradictions and otherness. The surviving trees have borne witness to a previous era, a time of other rulers, other customs and another world-view.
Alesworth has exhibited widely in Pakistan, and internationally at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2016, at the Fukuoka Asian Art Trienniale, Japan, at the the Third Asia Pacific Trienniale, Brisbane and at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto among others. His works are held in a number of public and private and international collections