(The Book of Nature)
"There is no Trope more flourishing than a Metaphore, especially if it be applied to the senses, and among the senses chiefly to the eye, which is the quickest of all the senses." --Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588)
Image (above) - Preliminary sketch of the proposal (graphite pencil w/ marker on vellum)
Program: Nature is Fashionable (Again)
1. How is visual perception a loss of authentic experience?
2. How close can we get to Nature?
3. Can we get outside our own skin?
4. Can we get under our own skin?
5. Is Nature transparent to thought or merely a mirror?
6. Is the Book of Nature indecipherable?
7. Does landscape design transcend picture making?
8. Does landscape design mimic mise en scène?
The garden will be formulated as a 'text' – plexiglas ‘book’, straw 'pool' with yellow irises (fleur-de-lis), plexiglas 'boulder', mirror glass with botanical citations, plants (dahlias) for 'footnotes' edging the sand path and grass surround.The classic figures of speech and thought – metonymy, irony, synecdoche, metaphor – will be embodied in the garden.
The garden will focus attention on the foundational language of landscape design – the non-semantic value of things-in-themselves and by extension discourse.
The project will simulate multiple 'readings' of landform, mineral form and horticultural form.
Suspended text will echo the central tableau – The Book of Nature – in the form of text-laminated mirrors with citations from books on botany and horticulture.
The mirror-glass stelai will form an informal 'backdrop' reflecting The Book of Nature and visitors passing through the garden. They will also represent human scale utilizing the tatami mat dimension of 3.5' x 7'.
Image (above) - Plexi-fashion, ladder-exit (collage w/ prismacolor pencil)
Vines (clematis) will climb the supporting 'arbor' and drape the upright mirrors. A synthetic cloud formation above the mirror-arbor will suggest theatricality, the mise en scène.
The ground plane will be covered with sod and a sand path cut through sprinkled with seashells.
A ladder will serve as an additional 'exit'.
MATERIALS1/ Three suspended mirror-glass panels (3.5’ x 7’) w/ laminated text panels
2/ Two coniferous specimen trees (12' Cupressocyparis leylandii)
3/ Aluminum 'cloud'
Image (above) - Arbor, text mirrors, aluminum cloud (collage w/ prismacolor pencil)
4/ Cork bark wrapped steel 'arbor' with vines (Clematis 'Comtesse de Bouchard', Clematis 'Etoile Violette')
5/ Plexiglas 'book' w/ laminated fashion images
6/ Plexiglas 'boulder' w/ laminated image7/ Straw 'pool' w/ yellow irises (Iris pseudacorus)
8/ Sand path w/ seashells
9/ Sod 'lawn' w/ flowering border (Dahlia 'Claudette', Dahlia 'Ecstasy', Dahlia 'Zingaro')
10/ Steel ladder (stile) as 'exit'
Image (above, left) - Plexi-boulder, straw pool, yellow iris (collage w/ prismacolor pencil)
POSTSCRIPT - This proposal was NOT funded.
