other sights

Artists and Gardens: A Growing Concern

Var­i­ous loca­tions, Van­cou­ver Fall 2011

by Robin Laurence

Orig­i­nal Arti­cle | Down­load (PDF — 729KB)

A cold wind blows off the grey waters of Vancouver’s False Creek. On a grassy promon­tory, just west of the Olympic Vil­lage and north of the for­mer city works yard, a gar­den is being dis­man­tled. Large planters, fash­ioned out of repur­posed ship­ping bags and perched on second-hand wooden pal­lets, have yielded up their sum­mer bounty of herbs, berries, grains, veg­eta­bles and edi­ble flow­ers. Work­shops have been given, walks have been con­ducted and seeds have been exchanged. More impor­tantly, the gar­den has sown a large crop of com­mu­nity inter­est and envi­ron­men­tal involvement.

Grow: An Art + Urban Agri­cul­ture Project, which offi­cially ends Novem­ber 30, has been a seven-month under­tak­ing of artist Holly Schmidt, a recent grad­u­ate of Emily Carr University’s master’s pro­gram with a sig­nif­i­cant back­ground in pub­lic pro­gram­ming. An exper­i­ment in grow­ing food in a “post-industrial” land­scape, Grow was orga­nized by Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a non-profit soci­ety that presents and sup­ports tem­po­rary pub­lic art works in shared spaces real and vir­tual, urban and elec­tronic. As Schmidt writes in her project state­ment, Grow has func­tioned as “a pub­lic forum, teach­ing tool and cre­ative lab­o­ra­tory for eco­log­i­cal and social sus­tain­abil­ity prac­tices.” In con­ver­sa­tion, she adds, “I’m inter­ested in how our urban envi­ron­ments are shift­ing and chang­ing as a result of pres­sures around the eco­log­i­cal cri­sis.” Cli­mate change, over­pop­u­la­tion and food secu­rity are some of the highly fraught sub­texts here.

Schmidt is an artic­u­late mem­ber of a new tribe of socially engaged artists who are com­mit­ted to cul­ti­vat­ing com­mu­nity gar­dens and urban agri­cul­tural plots as works of pub­lic art. Their cre­ative roots extend into a num­ber of post­mod­ern move­ments, from Fluxus and earth art to rela­tional aes­thet­ics and new genre pub­lic art, and their role is often to co-ordinate and facil­i­tate rather than man­u­fac­ture and lec­ture. As demon­strated by the Grow project, such artists are happy to con­sult the experts—biologists, agron­o­mists, hor­ti­cul­tur­ists, land­scape archi­tects, com­mu­nity workers—for pub­lic lessons in the keep­ing of mason bees, the cre­ation of ver­ti­cal straw­berry planters, or the build­ing of back­yard chicken coops. Demon­stra­tions and work­shops are an inte­gral part of the process.

Artist and pub­lic art con­sul­tant Bar­bara Cole, who is also the founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Other Sights, admires Schmidt and oth­ers of her gen­er­a­tion for their will­ing­ness to make them­selves “vul­ner­a­ble” to these knowledge-gathering sit­u­a­tions. “Holly will choose a sub­ject that she has a lit­tle bit of infor­ma­tion about and then, in a really pub­lic way, she will put her­self out there to learn more,” Cole observes. The inten­tion is pub­lic prob­lem solv­ing rather than indi­vid­ual self-expression—generating con­ver­sa­tions, inspir­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion and actively (rather than the­o­ret­i­cally) address­ing a range of con­tem­po­rary issues.

Across town, in Vancouver’s Mount Pleas­ant neigh­bour­hood, Sharon Kallis is putting another socially respon­si­ble gar­den to sleep for the win­ter. Known as the Means of Pro­duc­tion Com­mu­nity Gar­den, it was cre­ated as a liv­ing pub­lic art piece in 2002 by Oliver Kell­ham­mer in part­ner­ship with the city’s Envi­ron­men­tal Youth Alliance. Their project was to cul­ti­vate what had been a small par­cel of urban waste­land as a source of artists’ mate­ri­als, such as fibres and dyes. (Later, the EYA also worked with the com­mu­nity to sow and grow indige­nous plants and a ter­raced fruit orchard.) After Kell­ham­mer com­pleted his phase of the project’s imple­men­ta­tion, the “means of pro­duc­tion” part of the gar­den declined, then was revived in 2007 when Kallis and oth­ers came together to form the Means of Pro­duc­tion Artists’ Raw Resource Col­lec­tive. As with Grow, MOPARRC artists cul­ti­vate the gar­den, under­take exper­i­men­tal plant­i­ngs and instal­la­tions, con­duct work­shops, and orga­nize talks and social events.

“Oliver’s inten­tion was that other artists would come in, work with the mate­ri­als that were planted and rein­ter­pret the gar­den,” Kallis says, “and the gar­den would change and shift with dif­fer­ent cre­ative ideas.” Her own cre­ative ideas are directed towards inva­sive plants, such as morn­ing glory, Scotch broom and Eng­lish ivy. “I weed these beds and I use the weeds for my work,” she says sim­ply. “I really am more of a gleaner than a gar­dener.” Kallis method­i­cally strips and dries the unde­sir­able plants and deliv­ers com­mu­nity work­shops in “inva­sive bas­ketry,” weav­ing use­ful objects such as shade struc­tures out of the “gleaned” stems and strands.

One of Kallis’ most ambi­tious and suc­cess­ful under­tak­ings to date is The Ivy Project in Vancouver’s beloved Stan­ley Park. Kallis and a group of vol­un­teers culled masses of Eng­lish ivy from the park, dried it, then cro­cheted it into an enor­mous net to secure an erod­ing slope and make it suit­able for grow­ing indige­nous plants such as spirea, dog­wood and native wil­low. “My big thing is going from green waste man­age­ment to resource man­age­ment,” she explains, “look­ing at these mate­ri­als in abun­dance as a resource to cap­i­tal­ize on.”

Much as Van­cou­verites see them­selves on the cut­ting edge of green, the many gar­dens and urban agri­cul­tural projects cul­ti­vated by artists in this city are merely part of a much larger trend. Cole cites Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the Getty Cen­ter in Los Ange­les; projects by the Pub­lic Works Group in Lon­don; Sarah Sze’s instal­la­tion on the High Line in New York; the Inter­na­tional Gar­den Fes­ti­val at Jardins de Métis in Grand-Métis; and Mar­jet­ica Potrč’s numer­ous agri­cul­tural infra­struc­ture projects in Europe, the United States and South America.

What all these under­tak­ings appear to have in com­mon is the will­ing­ness of artists to bury their egos in order to grow mean­ing­ful and pro­duc­tive gar­dens and fos­ter a sense of com­mu­nity. “I think of my role as an artist as partly that of a bridge-builder,” says Kallis. “I see oppor­tu­ni­ties and I draw lines between things and make connections.”