Thursday 27 March 2003

The Art of Gardening

The Art of Gardening

At some point, just about every gardener feels the urge to place a work of art amongst the annuals and the groundcover, to nestle a sculpture in a budding grove, or to frame it with a wall of ivy. It is curious, this urge, because we tend to associate gardening with a love of nature, and art sometimes seems so “unnatural.” Art is symbolic. Art represents human feeling and thinking, and by its very definition, something made by human hands. But gardening isn’t entirely ‘natural’ either. Gardening is the human cultivation of the natural world – a humanization of the wild. “Select this flower. Plant its seed here. Trim this bush and make a place for people.” Next will come a bench, a small table, and then maybe, some art.

Both gardening and art making are component parts of place making. We make places by projecting ourselves into a space. When we garden, we project our place in the natural world. We prune and shape bushes to create paths and walk ways. We plant grass to grow under our feet, flowers to bloom around us, trees shade us from the sun. When we make art we gather the things around us that we love and admire, things that remind of the past, charms and votive objects that represent our hopes for the future, and our talismans for the things we fear. This now is a place that we can call home.

And so when it came to discussing the little piece of land owned by the city of Cambridge – that lot adjacent to the Ferguson Cottage at 37 Grand Avenue, just the other side of the fish and chip shop – and whether it was to stay as it was or become a parking lot, Heather Franklin, artist and member of the Galt Horticultural Society and Judy Welsh, executive member of the Horticultural Society, proposed to the city in 1999 to establish the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. The Cambridge Sculpture Garden would be a place where contemporary artists would place their work on the banks of the Grand River, on land that would be cultivated and tended by the horticultural society, in the old community of Galt, for the residents of the modern city of Cambridge.

One of the first accomplishments of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden was the relocation of Andreas Gehr’s sculpture, Twilight, in September of 2000, from its location at the Grand River Conservation Authority. Andreas Gehr’s piece was originally built in the nineteen eighties as part of Cambridge Galleries’ Public Art Programme. The once electrified and illuminated piece had since that time languished in benign neglect. Yet, even minus its electrical peripherals, the rust red spiralling tower is still a remarkable sculptural object. Part ‘Tower of Babel,’ part soft ice cream swirl in rust red steel – it is dramatically visible again, thanks to the sculpture garden.

Early commissions by Sculpture Garden were undertaken for short terms and special occasions, and the committee began to experience the challenges of exhibiting art outdoors. To celebrate the opening in the fall of 2000, Graham Todd, Dennis Bolohan, Scott McNichol and Allan Flint were invited to install temporary works. Dennis Bolohan’s Labyrinth,a maze planted in the summer of 2001, suffered from an exceedingly hot and dry summer and never fully realized the artist’s conception. Scott McNichol’s A Question of Who’s in Charge, originally constructed impermanently of painted Styrofoam and installed just for the opening, was recreated in fibreglass for long term installation in the summer of 2001. Unfortunately, the piece has been repeatedly vandalized. The bold rhetorical challenge to authority posed by the artist in the work has been played out in real life, as the Sculpture Garden struggles to assert its right to exhibit art outdoors and to present artistic expression in a public space. 

One of the landmark pieces of the Sculpture Garden has been Allan Flint’s Use, installed in the spring of 2001. Flint was originally invited to participate in the grand opening, but his work arrived later, and in a much more resilient form. A concatenation of large, yellow, three dimensional letters, Useseems like text on a holiday, where language and meaning withdraw from the world of chatter to sink into a primordial garden of sights and sounds and smells.  

Thanks to a project grant from the Ontario Arts Council, a call for entry was circulated in the province and a jury was convened to commission three new works in the Spring of 2002. Ryzsard Litviniuk, Max Streicher and Marguerite Larmand were charged with creating semi-permanent works of art – artworks that would endure the arbitrary temperaments of man and nature for one calendar year. Ryzsard Litviniuk’s hollowed wood sculpture Tension - 14 from 2, was the first of this group to be installed in the summer of 2002. Litviniuk wields a chainsaw like a scalpel, and cuts thick unseasoned tree stumps into delicately telescoping forms. The piece installed at the Sculpture Garden consisted of fourteen sections cut from two triangular shaped stumps and mounted on steel reinforcement rods. There is an elegant machismo to all of Litviniuk’s art. In the grand tradition of male abstract sculpturing, his work expands and rises with strength and virility – a strength which in his case is also tempered by the deftness and delicacy with which he directs his roughly hewn material.

Ironically, the delicate parts of Ryszard Litviniuk’s sculpture proved too delicate for the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. Tensionwas vandalized and the piece was removed. The Sculpture Garden was relandscaped and berms were created to prevent vandals from driving their vehicles on to the property to tow or drag the sculptures from their moorings. Subsequently, the works proposed for the site by Max Streicher and Marguerite Larmand both included design considerations to deter further vandalism.

Max Streicher’s piece, Windsock, was installed in October of 2002. Streicher has become internationally known for his inflatable sculpture and recognized locally for his 1998 exhibition at Cambridge Galleries. Obviously, a thin mechanically inflated membrane, sitting on the ground would be impossible given electrical power limitations and increasing security concerns for the site. Streicher decided that instead of using electrical fans to inflate his work, he would elevate the figures on flag poles, and open them up to collect the prevailing winds like windsocks. The adult male figures that he customarily uses in his inflatables was substituted for an infant toddler proportioned figure. The proportionately larger head and little round pot belly recall the famously animated dancing baby hallucinated by Calista Lockhart on the television show Ally McBeal. But Streicher’s babies, blowing with the winds high above the Grand River, are not biological determinism’s siren song. Rather, they resemble more the spirit of the lullaby “Rock a bye baby” – lazily lolling in the breeze like kites, rising and falling, sleep inducing and hypnotic.  

Similarly, Marguerite Larmand, whose work Afloatwas installed in May of 2003, chose to elevate her wax figures in towers constructed of young maple trees. In contrast to Streicher’s floating figures, Larmand’s sentinels are made of sterner stuff. As is customary for the artist, her figures are created and then wrapped and supported by natural elements, articulating her belief in humanity’s cyclical place in the eco system. Yet this work is not dewy-eyed naturalism either. These sober figures seem to survey the community from fortified watchtowers, as if they might be at once both the city’s guardians and its prisoners. Perhaps Larmand’s sentinels are like an ecological and art settler movement, as they greet the elements and challenge the vandals from their fortified towers: “We are here,” they seem to be saying, “We are strong and multiplying.”

The art of gardening requires that every spring the dead and dying plants and vines are cut back and new life is transplanted and seeded. The life of cities needs replanting too, and the Cambridge Sculpture Garden is one of those new seeds.

Gordon Hatt, 2003