ARTISTS TALKING

# 6 [24 January 2010]

28 DAYS OUTDOOR ART SPACE

AND A VERY CREATIVE NURSERY

I have been thinking about Little Sparta lately.

Ian Hamilton Finlay had many disputes with the authorities about his garden, all tiny little wars evicted and invented by people with a kind of authority, I like to call them king of the rock. 

Now his garden is a main attraction and is very much admired by many people. It is a great example of a garden as a piece of art. His dispute was about rates and if the converted byre was a temple of Apollo as temples are religious buildings which do not need to pay rates. 

Our own little sparta fight is from a different angle but we as well need to deal with authority.

Authority is them who have power to give orders and enforce obedience; or an expert in a particular field. The Pembrokeshire National Park calls itselve authority but do they have power to give orders or make us obey or are they experts? Well not really - they deal with planning regulations, not law and order.

We are now forced into a planning procedure for a garden that was build around 1800, long before planning regulations were thought about. Somewhere down the line it got the planning consent of a nursery with "farm-gate selling"; for anything else they say we need planning permission - for running an open air gallery behind walls - without electricity, toilet etc. The price of this will be over £1,000 without a guarantee of getting permission. They even want an application for the pond - that is already there. Graciously not for the path - already a year in use also.

Our budget is too small for adventures like that; so we have to go for a "nursery" which we would be partly anyway as we grow many of the plants ourself for in the pots and garden art. We are a "creative nursery" where you can buy plants in very interesting pots and very "creative" plants. So what to do?

The planning regulation allows you a usage of your land for 28 days a year for a different purpose. 28 days are 672 hours a year. With a bit of creative time-bookkeeping: 672 hours divided to 6 opening hours a day is - voila - 112 days or 3.6 month that we can be open as an open air art space as well as a creative nursery.

So tell me, when we do artistic tricks with the trees and let them grow in different ways: do we need planning for this? Can the Park Authority say how we should grow plants and in which pots we should sell them, before we can call our-self a nursery?

Does this not remind you on the complain of who can call themselves an artist? An other little war with another little authority (kings of the rock), art colleges, art critics, galleries, and even other artists and, well, the audience as well.

A garden can only be a piece of art when made by an artist, really???  Anything can become a piece of art if made by a creative mind and anybody can have a creative mind. Now you are very free to not liking it but does that make it a lesser piece of art? "If you celebrate it, it is art. If you don't, it isn't" said John Cage. We agree and celebrate.

A gardener is not automatically an artist and an artist is not a gardener but still we see many amazing gardens which are sure pieces of art.

# 5 [19 December 2009]

IS A GARDEN A PIECE OF ART ????

i have been looking at this question for a while now.  First of all i have to ask "What is art?"  There are many many books written about this but i chose to look in the Oxford dictionary:

art the expression of creative skill in a visual form

OK than i asked "What is creative?"

creative involving the use of the imagination or original ideas in order to create something.

When you look at these definitions you see why so many people say everybody can be an artists and anything can be a piece of art. Marcel Duchamp made the toilet for a moment a piece of art as his idea to put ready-made object in an exhibition was an original idea. That does not make all toilets a piece of art. However some toilets made with some imagination are a piece of art as well as the toilet that is changed with imagination becomes a piece of art. With other words when we use our imagination and skills we can make any object into a piece of art. 

So my answer is: a garden CAN be or become a piece of art by using your imagination.

Most gardening books are full of rules and regulations and a mind-blowing amount of names. One needs to put these books aside to become creative and just try things out. You do need to know your material with which you are creative but that does not mean that you are totally limited, you can push boundaries. 

This is way i like to call myself an artist rather than a gardener as an artist i can push boundaries, try things out, give subtle messages and just have more fun than a gardener who does it all by the book of rules.

It does not mean that i can do it easy i suppose it has to do with my upbringing and our society where everything is divided in right and wrong. So when we are creative we will always have responses like right and wrong and than you need courage to carry on and push more bounderies.

Now i am just going to look more at what makes a garden creative ART and what makes a garden just a garden.

speak you later

magda

# 4 [18 November 2009]

SCULPTURAL TREES

In nature you see lots of sculptural trees, made by the wind, water, animals or a combination of them. They are my big inspiration and i think for centuries they have inspired other artist and gardeners all in their own way.

Graham Sutherland was inspired by the amazing trees at the Cleddau river, their roots and their shapes. He collected the rocks that lay around the roots showing a different sculpture. The rocks look like they have segments carved out like cubism done by nature. Graham paintings are his perception of the river edge trees and rocks.

The Cleddau river trees are my inspiration to make sculptural trees.

To create a sculpture with a living tree ask patience and time, most of all it will never be finished. Some of the Japanese gardens have trees that have been sculptured by several generation of gardeners. A gardener goes to these trees and continue what somebody started several hundred years ago.

That tree is not like a painting from Rembrant van Rijn, the same today as when he did paint it, but very different from year to year. It is a constant changing piece of art made by several artist.

When i think about it i do not know who will finish the sculpture the tree or me or even an other artist/gardener. It depends who will die first but till that time we do work together in an odd sort of way.

to read more click here

# 3 [28 August 2009]

THOUGHTS WHILE WEEDING

Bindweed yep it made 70% of the garden plants grow horizontal, made the garden look like a ghost-house full of cob-webs. Nature has her own way and that is what i like from nature, wild nature, it goes beyond rules and regulations true transgression, nature does not discriminate, so no need for political correct actions.

Nature just has the aim of growing and grows at times against all odds. The Japanese knotweed growing through concrete footpaths, how much we humans hate that kind of actions. Humans want to control nature, use nature, conger nature, change nature. Humans divide all by right and wrong weeds, pest against pets and crops. As an artist i create i use material and bend it and twist it until it resemble what i want to show. A land artist uses nature as material so why not using a garden cultivated nature why not using so called weeds using bindweed making a sculpture with weeds growing weeds not dead or burned weed. hmmmm why not I am a land artist i use nature as my inspiration and as material

For now i just pulled bindweed from the wild-roses as i rather have the roses than the bindweed at that spot gardeners playing god deciding what can grow and what not. Tomorrow i will start with the idea of bindweed sculpture. I already use self-seeded sycamores and ashes which i made into living sculptures using their growing force to make sculptures. The Japanese call it Niwak, bonsai with large trees, noting new what i am doing, justa little bit different. If i knew how to add photos to this blog i would show you Flag one of these living sculptures.

mAgdA

# 2 [23 July 2009]

LANDART POETRY TRAIL

in the Rookery Walled Garden

We are proud to present a collaboration of artists from different "realities" and different art forms.  A Landart group of the web photo community Flickr published photos of their works. A poetry group of the web based interactive 3D platform Second Life wrote Haiku, a special poetry form, about the photos. The artists involved are from different backgrounds and nationalities.

Connecting different art and different realities as the result will be placed in the Rookery Walled Garden, Solva, Pembrokeshire.

The exhibition can also been seen in Second Life and in Flickr. 

dAbE Art

# 1 [25 June 2009]

so we started in March 2009 with a totally overgrown space wild is not the word dead is more the word

there were plants alive but they were covered by dead plants

so cleaning is the word to do

not me as i was and am recovering from sever heart surgery ( i was born with a deformed heart) i was doing little

it was pulling collecting dead and than we burned it all

in reaction to this time i made a piece of land-art called yep BURNED 

it is made from the ash of the fires and burned wood and planted with plants i rescued from the old nursery that was in the garden BLACK grass with a yellow grass in the middle

land art in a reaction to the site in a reaction to what was happening there made with what i found there   site related space related in the garden