The garden has long served as a way of thinking about nature and culture, and how each influences the other. More than an idea, the garden exists as a physical space with plants, materials and objects arranged in space, its contents of which are partly constructed and partly natural. As human creations, gardens become both physical and social constructs carrying metaphors for cultivating, growing, caring, healing, mythic beginnings and utopic imaginings. As nature being cultivated, gardens also connote decay, perishing, domination, hubris and resistance. Nowhere more apt than Singapore, the garden trope becomes a useful lens for investigating the meaning of a garden, the act of gardening and our relationship to nature, environment and the ecology. The workshop will focus on gardening as praxis for art making and creating an artist garden.
The elective adopts gardening as a catalyst for thinking through many themes of human existence and well-being: our relationships with earth, nature, environment, food and ecology; as a community practice, asking what is and who are celebrated when we garden together; and as creative imaginings for human flourishing and potential futures in the human-animal-plant-earth nexus. Students will create an art garden within the Windstedt grounds individually or together. The garden becomes the site, the container or a space for working with nature as material, process, subject and/or co-partners, and gardening becomes the methodology for research, self-reflexive investigation and art making. Scale, type and complexity of the project are to be considered given the duration of the elective.
The elective adopts gardening as a catalyst for thinking through many themes of human existence and well-being: our relationships with earth, nature, environment, food and ecology; as a community practice, asking what is and who are celebrated when we garden together; and as creative imaginings for human flourishing and potential futures in the human-animal-plant-earth nexus. Students will create an art garden within the Windstedt grounds individually or together. The garden becomes the site, the container or a space for working with nature as material, process, subject and/or co-partners, and gardening becomes the methodology for research, self-reflexive investigation and art making. Scale, type and complexity of the project are to be considered given the duration of the elective.