 | Thinking the Sculpture Garden: Art, Plant, Landscape Subjects: Arts; Built Environment; Art & Visual Culture; Landscape; History of Art; Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics; Regional Art; Theory of Art; Visual Culture; Gardens and Designed Landscapes; Landscape Conservation Maintenance and Management; Landscape History; Theory of Landscape; This innovative book poses two, deceptively simple, questions: what is a sculpture garden, and what happens when you give equal weight to the main elements of landscape, planting and artwork? Its wide-ranging frame of reference, including the USA, Europe and Japan, is brought into focus through Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, with which the book begins and ends. Effectively less than 15 years old, and largely the work of one man, Tremenheere affords an opportunity to examine as work-in-progress the creation of a new kind of sculpture garden. Including a historical overview, the book traverses multiple ways of seeing and experiencing sculpture gardens, culminating in an exploration of their relevance as 'cultural ecology' in the context of globalisation, urbanisation and climate change. The thinking here is non-dualist and broadly aligned with New Materialisms and Material Feminisms to explore our place as humans in the non-human world on which we depend. Eminent contributors, including John Dixon Hunt, George Descombes, Bernard Lassus and David Leatherbarrow, approach these issues through practices and theories of landscape architecture; garden and art making; history and writing; and philosophy. Richly illustrated with over 100 images, including a colour plate section, the book will primarily appeal to those engaged in professional or academic research, along with sculpture garden visitors, who will find new and surprising ways of experiencing plants and art in natural and urban settings. Penny Florence is Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK. Previous appointments include Chair of Humanities and Design Sciences, Art Center, Pasadena, USA; Head of Research Programmes at The Slade; Professor of Contemporary Arts and Director of Research at Falmouth University and Co-Director of Women's Studies, Univeristy of Exeter, UK. She continues to exhibit art works and films and she is a published poet. She has also given public performances/exhibitions of digital poetry at Tate Modern, Tate Britain and internationally. Her international publications include a number of books and many articles on issues related to art, poetry and feminist philosophy/theory, including especially sculpture and word-image (sculpture, poetry and painting). She has published on the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Liz Larner among others, and contributed to the two-volume book Sculpture in 20th-century Britain (Henry Moore Institute). The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé in relation to painting is another sustained interest, as are feminism, innovation, experimentalism and the general shifting of boundaries. |
