TAXONOMY of SMALL JOYS
For me art making is all about the process. The sharing of experiences, investigation of ideas and learning of new techniques. A quote attributed to many individuals, including Buddha, succinctly describes how I feel about working towards an exhibition - life is a journey not a destination.
In 2016, using GARDEN as my starting point, I became obsessed with the results of an extensive research project conducted by Mike Stevens, lecturer for landscape studies at the university of NSW, entitled, The Congruent Garden. An investigation into the role of the domestic garden in satisfying fundamental human needs. It established that gardens satisfy nine human needs: Freedom, Identity, Creation, Understanding, Participation, Leisure, Affection, Protection, and Subsistence, across four existential states: Being, Having, Doing and Interacting.
Early in this journey I knew I required a technique which would assist me in portraying these nine needs, but that it would also need to incorporate my belief, that, it is not only that which we see, but also that which remains unseen, which is joyous and invaluable.
Laser cutting, with its negative spaces, hit me as a way to portray this other-worldly, multilayered feature of a garden.
Developing a body of drawings I attended courses in Illustrator and Coral Draw to produce the necessary Vector Files.
Attending various workshops at The Edge, State Library of Queensland I used their laser machine to cut 4mm ply.
The resulting laser cut images represent a collection of moments, of the unseen and elusive, which regularly occur in our garden. The applied layers of color using mono-printing and stencils represent the perpetual variables which create change, often in a heartbeat.
Identity - Authenticity
Science alone will never adequately explain how a garden helps us make sense of the disorientating confusion of modern society. Connecting with the elements in a garden can act as a buffer against the dread often presented by the big-picture of the world.
Subsistence - Acceptance
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live. Love and let love, flower and fade and follow the natural curve which flows on, pointless.
Participation - Choice
There are numerous lasting gifts we can bequeath our children: clean air, fertile soil, serenity, knowledge, roots, and another is wings. However, there is nothing in which birds differ more from man than the way they manage to construct and yet leave the landscape as it was before.
Understanding - Nurturance
Gardening is an exercise in optimism and often a triumph of hope over experience. Gardeners know there has to be a balance of humility and benevolence. Of course it also helps to exercise control, servitude, respect, pragmatism and ecological conscience.
Creation - Inheritance
The purposeful introduction of foreign flora and fauna has often produced disastrous problems, and yet deliberate hybridization has given plants a complex hybridization and plants a complex inheritance which can prove highly beneficial to the birds.
Freedom - Experiences
Because of the adventurous spirit of naturalists, the covetous cravings of entrepreneurs and relentless development through grafting, rooting, budding, mutation and hybridization we have a plethora of vegetable plants, fruit trees and flowers which thrive in todays gardens.
Leisure - Finding self
Gardening is ultimately a folly which allows us to make our own mark apon the land, providing delight and a place in which to rest. The sound of birds can stop the corrosive chatter of the mind. The sun and rain can clean and heal. The inaudible glide of the wind may sooth the soul.
Sometimes I sits and think, and sometimes I just sit - A.A Milne
Protection - Responsibility
Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time. Change marches on relentlessly, as time speed past regardless. And what was is not and never again will be.
To what shall I compare this life of ours?
Even before I can say,
It is like a lightning flash, or a dewdrop,
It is no more.
- Sengai
Life - living
It used to be thought that our love of plants wans an impractical but pure passion. But now, in the age of environmental crisis we are discovering that gardening is essential to human life.
- Jaqueline Heriteau
Being, Having, Doing, Interacting
The sun rises pink and gold, momentarily highlighting a landscape sparkling with dew-drenched cob-webs looking like fishermen's nets crafted from stainless steel; gossamer, ethereal and otherwordly. A grey heron arrives to gracefully stalk the ponds. I make coffee and in my moment of busyness feather and shimmer disappear as if displeased by my inattentiveness.
Affection - Anticipation
One of the most delightful things about the garden is the anticipation it provides. To be intimately aware that there are unseen happenings afoot. Tending the garden with parental solitude, loving what you do and feeling that it matters, is one of life's greatest joys.
Throughout my observation of our garden, researching and learning the new technique of laser cutting, I have realized that art, gardening, and text despite being unique dialects, when juxtaposed, echo and augment each other. Together the three speak in a hybrid language, far richer than each could be on their own. And it is through the added exploration of text that I have been able to come to terms with complexity and saturation of imagery in every day life within a garden.
