Garden Solitaire

Art Catalogue of Works. Artist's Essay: Garden Solitaire Neglect will make of gardens, haunts. Emergent scrub and gathering detritus trace an edge between a garden and it’s undoing. In outgrown states the garden tells of its and our own vicissitudes. Contemplating unkempt groves between long-lived hedges, we are (suddenly) alone at a point of concealing darkness. And, wandering fox-hollowed paths to light-wells, a game of garden solitaire will ensue. Voices from the house are distant. Except for the birds, we are lone witness to saplings grow uninvited, to trees lean and fall, to brambles colonise in long arcs. Topiary and mown grass, if maintained, will become sporadic outposts, fusing with copses to disappear one year. In time, too, garden apparatus banished from neat areas, will come to grace these quiet, unbidden groves. We may start to find that such liminal places–thickets–deliver respite, so becoming the only garden we require: A Hinterland to evoke all that needs to be undone, rather than that which needs to be done. I have kept a garden such as this. It started life through setting out a formal enclosure, but became a process art of partially preserving a mess of scrubby trees that threatened such order. White poplar, hawthorn, and sallow arrived, and leaning, seeding, suckering with dusty blackberry, they found their way amoung those ‘noble’ hedges and groves of lime, yew, box and hornbeam: the first origins of the garden. For years, thresholds between colonised and cultivated ground were worked, as much through stillness as toil. Tree species each gave their character, expressed as dark and light. I matched their black and white seasons with rough ground, portable chairs, buckets. Rain water, dust, and snow blew in. With these elements and the murky-pure trees, makeshift realms were orchestrated as gardens of solitariness, shrines even. Here is a catalogue of these works–part garden, part-installation, part-terrain vague–not here for long.