Vancouver Garden Story
Gardening has been a long-loved interest and passion of mine. I would say that it is my hobby. Over the last several years, I have greatly expanded this hobby, and it has brought me to a point of trying to reconcile the many, many hours I spend in the dirt. What is to be done with a hobby that begins to take the time of a job? Thus, Vancouver Garden Story was born!
Vancouver Garden Story is my research-based gardening practice that I am using to inform my artwork. I have always incorporated plants, herbs and flowers into my visual artwork, but I have begun taking a more involved approach by only using imagery straight from my garden. It is a joy to study the life cycle of these botanical babies, nurture them as they grow, lament their passing, curse their theft and the thieves who run off with them in the night and occasionally, eat them.
I also use plants to build sculpture-like structures, and have, for several years now, built a well-known garden fort around my apartment that has the neighbors and passersby stopping to stare. I love this form of vertical gardening as not only does it make the best use of our small city garden beds, but it also provides us with privacy and shade in the hot summer.
I also love growing foods and herbs.
Not only do they nourish us with the taste of pure sunshine, the foods that I grow often feature in my artworks as well.
I have big dreams for expanding my garden project. I want to get back into ceramics, an art form I have not seriously worked in since early college. I have visions of earthworks, large, growing sculptures, and beans up to the roof. I love the temporality of earth and garden-based works; they are meant to be enjoyed in the moment.
I love the faculty and sense of autonomy gardening brings to the creative. Last year, for example, I grabbed my handsaw and built myself a simple potting station in an afternoon. Working with one’s hands, planting seeds, touching worms, eating bugs. This can only lead to great things.
The Potting Bench, 8” x 8”, Watercolour
