To the keen observer, Sydney’s
inner suburbs are filled with potted histories of weedy characters and
flourishing romances that have shaped them and those who live within them.
Now three artists, Tessa Rapaport, Karl Logge and Diego
Bonetto, have set out to collect the living stories of Redfern through some of
its reclusive and most unassuming residents: its pot plants.
“People are very forthcoming,” Bonetto says.
“You know: ‘This [was] given to me from my ex-husband when we were getting
divorced, it’s a happy plant. We divorced, but I still have the happy
plant.”‘
The Hanging Gardens, a living installation set up inside the
usually not-so-verdant foyer of CarriageWorks for this week’s Underbelly
emerging arts festival, examines the premise that plants are part of any
community – and a way that people form relationships with each other as well as
their environment.
“It’s like going to the park with your dog and you have
all of these dog friends that you just know by the name of their pets,”
Bonetto says. “Garden relationships are very similar: ‘Ah, you know that
lady who owns that bougainvillea along the fence …’ “
Residents have been invited to lend their beloved botanicals
to the trio for the project, which culminates at the two-day festival this
weekend, providing them with care instructions and a letter of introduction
that will be displayed alongside each pot plant during their stay at
CarriageWorks.
The installation has already collected dozens of plants from
across the inner west. Together it is hoped they will form a green picture of
how the area and its residents have grown over time. “They never seem to
die,” says a handwritten card attached to a small pot. “I’m 83 years
old and I’ve lost much agility that is required to look after a garden.
Therefore these evergreen succulents provide me with much pleasure and will do
so in the years that I have ahead of me.”
Bonetto says many people form special relationships with
plants, using them as a marker to an important time in their lives. One of the
installation’s frangipanis was planted by a mother when she was five months’
pregnant, for example, while another of the plants, a lopsided cactus, turned
up at a children’s birthday party one year and never left.
Logge says that potted plants are a way of keeping a
connection to the natural, even in the most urban of environments. “In the
inner city the pot plant is one bit of nature you can hang onto,” he says.
It’s also contrary reality to the Aussie ideal of a big
backyard for communities in drought-prone cities, where a sunny stretch of
lawn, outside the confines of a park, is a rare luxury.
Rapaport and Logge, who teach sustainable design, say they
want people to acknowledge green spaces already present in urban ones; a green
movement that everyone can already participate in.
“We can try to make our buildings as green as possible
and try to do all these things, but we’re still working with the urban
environment,” Logge says. “This kind of project is about trying to
place the natural in direct confrontation with the industrial and the urban.
And that’s what people have responded to quite nicely.”
Which, if all goes to plan, will lead to a complete green
invasion of the concrete, steel and glass of CarriageWorks by this weekend.
“When you take all these little pot plants, standing
them next to each together, they form this green mass,” Logge says.
“So en masse, pot plants become a kind of jungle in a way.”
In fact, two of the biggest additions to the installation
were among the first to arrive at CarriageWorks. A rubber plant and a ficus
have been at the site for about 10 years – putting down roots well before the
venue was turned into an arts centre last year.
“These plants have stood sentinel; they watched it all
change,” Logge says. “To me it also points to a fact – it might be
sooner rather than later – when this place is not full of people plants will
still be around, pushing up through the cracks.”
Photo: Fiona Morris – The Hanging Gardens … Diego Bonetto,
left, Tessa Rapaport and Karl Logge erect their artwork at the CarriageWorks.
Source:
www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/07/08/1215282835469.html?feed=fairfaxdigitalxml