Homage to Guerilla Gardening
« back to All BlogsBy Debbie Hagan
“Homage to Guerilla Gardening is an urban gardening project paying tribute to the illicit horticulture practices of the guerilla gardener,” writes New Hampshire artist Alison Williams about a project she initiated about a month ago on a vacant lot in New Haven, Connecticut, blocks away from Yale University.
Rather than being illicit, however, Williams obtained permission to use this communal space, tying it into an ongoing exhibit, Marie Celeste, at Artspace, an adjacent gallery. Williams also has an installation in that show, Glass House #3, which will be reviewed in Art New England’s July/August issue.
Garden filled and planted
This past May, one of my creative nonfiction students at New Hampshire Institute of Art, Ian Decelli, rode with Williams in her red truck and helped her pick up donate and discarded household items which she used to build the garden. Here is an excerpt from Ian’s essay on that experience and what he learned about this artist:
The following week there were more errands to run. That Sunday morning we drove out to New Boston to the home of [a fellow faculty member at the New Hampshire Institute of Art who] had a lot of old cooking pots and flower pots, in addition to an old bicycle that still worked. We took the pots, of course, and we took the bicycle for the pedal-powered pump Alison was planning to build at Artspace…. Several smaller projects will make up Homage to Guerilla Gardening, including the creation of vertical gardens on walls from found containers with edible and decorative plants, and a watering system powered by an old bicycle with small water towers and fountains and pipe that would feed the various garden planters while inviting audience participation.
[Alison] told me a story about in the summer of 2009 at Babson College, where she had a solo exhibition of her glasshouses, titled Microclimates. They had planted an organic garden on campus, and one of the tomato seeds had blown away and had started growing in the middle of the parking lot, in a crack in the asphalt. “There’s something about the tenacity of nature that makes me feel really happy. We think we’ve got it all controlled, we think we’ve concreted it over and paved it down and tamed it,” she said… “but you know that if people stopped driving down this road and stopped taking care of it, in two years time it would be completely grown over. There’s something about that that’s really exciting to me.” It’s reflective of her art-making process.
Like many artists before her, chance factors heavily into her work. For instance in 1951, Ellsworth Kelly made paintings by selecting numbers at random and assigning colors to a grid based on the numbers, filtering his gesture (a popular idea in abstract expressionism) through processes that he determined but didn’t necessarily control—setting in motion an open-ended operation rather than performing discrete, bounded actions. For Alison this was exactly like gardening.
When she was a child in New Zealand (which has a temperate climate…) she would secretly plant things in random places in her father’s garden to see if they would sprout, to make him wonder how they got there. She has always gardened and she has always made art. After she got married and got a house… she had her own garden again for the first time since she was a child in New Zealand. When winter came everything just vanished, and it was serious.
“My complete horror over that made me really start thinking about what it was about gardens that I really liked and why I felt the need to make a garden. And then the other activity I’ve always done and always loved in the same way was making art. So I started thinking about what those two drives are; how similar they feel to me; and why I want to garden and to make art.” She didn’t have any other reason for doing art other than that she had always done it, and she actually always wanted to be an artist. “I think about this a lot as a teacher, whether there’s there a natural tendency toward something, a natural proclivity to be able to do something, a talent. I don’t know that I possess talent, but I do think that I was encouraged at a really early age to practice and also that that encouragement gave me a sense of confidence, and that if you believe you’re going to be something for long enough you kind of just become it. You practice and practice….”
Homage to Guerilla Gardening and the accompanying Marie Celeste at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut, continues until September 9, 2011.
| Youre on top of the game. Thanks for shairng. |
| Posted by: Rose On: Jun 22, 2011 10:06 pm |
