The Arrangements – assembling nature
February - April 2022
I’m ensconced as artist in residence in a remarkable place.
This is a creative project that offers an extraordinary opportunity to build on established concerns about our impact on the environment and to consider the relationship between the domestic and scientific interpretation of the natural world, from both historic and contemporary perspectives.
Carrick Hill is a grand house filled with an eclectic and historically significant art collection, surrounded by extensive heritage gardens ringed by native bushland. The original contents of the house are almost completely intact and the grounds undiminished.
Carrick Hill is a time capsule of privileged mid-twentieth century life in Adelaide, with domestic spaces that exude the power of living with art. My interest lies in unpicking the relationship of the garden to the house; to investigate the roles and rituals of cultivation, harvest, arrangement and display, that plants played in the life of the residents. To look at the relationship we now have with the natural world under changed circumstances and global pressures. To reflect on causes and shifting attitudes towards environmental consciousness.
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Situated in the heart of the house is a special, purpose-built room - the flower room. Rather like a home laboratory, it is dedicated to arranging flowers, fresh-cut from the lavish gardens. Assembled and distributed around the house, these arrangements were significant to the artistic vigour of the domestic spaces and an important daily ritual.
During this project I’ll consider the notion of the home laboratory as a place to study the critical and shifting relationships between plants and humans, as a place to explore the role of nature within the fabric of the everyday. The daily ritual of bringing the outside in queries the role and interpretation of nature.
There are two fundamental questions that underpin this project, the first - in today’s world how do we engage with the environment around us when we are distanced from it? The second - can living with art inform the art of living?
I’m looking forward to being absolutely immersed here for a few months, then the plan is to shift to my studio to generate a creative response that will be presented at Carrick Hill over the period of the 2023 Adelaide Festival.