The community garden experience < our experience

EMBRACING ART IN SA

claire fulton reports...

COMMUNITY GARDENS have taken root all over Australia in the past decade. They’re places where people come together to grow food and grow community.

In community gardens, people learn, grow and actively create, so it’s not surprising that many community gardens have begun to embrace art projects as a way to involve people and celebrate the connections between gardens and people.

Community gardens seem to attract and inspire artworks of one kind or another. Garden gnomes are often the first to appear. They’re closely followed by wind-catching assemblages of sea shells and shrines of reclaimed urban flotsam. The installations that accumulate are unique, sometimes trashy but always meaningful. I recall one plot I visited in a Melbourne community garden which had red carpeting, fading framed photographs and ceramic terriers guarding its bumper crop of tomatoes.

There are more than 30 community gardens in South Australia. I decided to visit three to see how they have integrated more formal participatory community art projects.

Strawbale building at Fern Avenue Community Garden

Beneath the persimmon

Fern Avenue Community Garden in Adelaide’s inner-southern suburbs is a hub of conviviality and productivity. Beneath an ancient overarching persimmon tree — abundant with rosy fruit in the autumn — gardeners tend individual plots brimming with vegetables, herbs and leafy greens.
In their communal garden area, the gardeners have planted a small orchard to demonstrate ways to grow fruit trees, even in the smallest urban spaces. There are examples of espaliered fruit trees and of grafting multiple varieties onto one rootstock and experiments with planting several different trees in the same hole so that they naturally dwarf each other.

In 1999, a strawbale community house was built in a series of workshops to house the many workshops and events that the garden hosts and as a place for gardeners to gather to drink tea at the end of the day’s work. The building features rainwater harvesting and one of Adelaide’s first dry composting toilets.

Streeet sign on fence at Fern Avenue Community Garden

It also provided an opportunity for Fern Avenue’s first adventure in community art.

The gardeners invited people from the nearby Julia Farr Centre, which provides services to those with brain injury and other disability, to help add the finishing touches to the new building.

Alan Shephard, the Julia Farr artist-in-residence at the time, after months of “trawling through tile shops seeking donations of materials,” as he says, facilitated the design and construction of a mosaic panel on the house’s inside wall.

It was a local resident, who regularly walked past the site, who recognised the next opportunity to integrate artwork into the garden.

“She thought... this is a lovely garden here but with no signage to let people know about it... it’s a wasted resource”, said Alan.

The experience of making the first mosaic piece had been such a positive one — with a whole community of people introduced to the garden — that the gardeners and the disability centre decided to team up again.

The mural took nine months to make. Julia Farr residents spent a session or two a week working on it.

“It was very slow”, said Alan. “We were working with people with major disabilities, perhaps with the use of just one finger. Sometimes I would spend a whole session working one-to-one just to break a few tiles”.

Their hard worked paid off. Now, visitors and passers-by are welcomed into the garden with a sign that not only identifies it as a community garden but recognises its history as part of one of Adelaide’s original orchards and the site of the Fullarton Jam Factory (1857-1920).

Despite the intensity of the labour, Alan said he found the project very satisfying.

“Community gardening and community arts are closely linked,” he said. “Not so much in terms of their end-product but by a process of participation. Art projects give people a feeling of ownership and give the garden

Mosaic paver at Fern Avenue

On the cross paths

Kurruru Pingyarendi Community Garden in Adelaide’s north-eastern suburbs is situated at the cross paths of a community health centre, child care centre and Aboriginal neighbourhood house. The garden includes an indigenous bush tucker trail, fruit trees, vegetable beds, a herb wheel and a sensory garden.

Gardeners wanted to create artworks in the garden to reflect themes of harmony, cultural diversity and connection. Workshops, community gatherings and celebrations are important to Kurruru Pingyarendi, so the gardeners also wanted to preserve a large open space. They decided to create a huge, two-dimensional mosaic spiral which Julie Coulls, a health worker at Gilles Plains Community Health Service and co-ordinator of the garden, says reflects what the garden is about.

Spiral at Kurruru Pingyarendi

“The spiral shape is about reflection, looking at things from a different direction, harmony and all the things that spirals and circles represent to different peoples,” she said.

Kurruru Pingyarendi means ‘turning circle’ in Kaurna, the language of the local Aboriginal people. The name was chosen to capture people’s desire for ‘turning towards justice, community and connection’. It refers to a discovery made when digging on the site.

“They came across a circle of river stones,” said Julie. “With a bit of investigation, it turned out that the stones were part of a turning circle for horse-drawn carts when the site land was a farm run by the first white settler, a Mr Suddholtz”.

The stones were kept and have now become part of turning circle.

The project was a truly participatory one, with many community members involved. The garden works closely with the adjoining school, child care centre and community assistance project, which were all involved with the artwork. Other community members came along for the art project and have since become involved in the garden.

The project was facilitated by landscape designer and Kaurna cultural advisor, Paul Herzich, and it became a “process of learning about culture and protocols”. The spiral contains images and the Kaurna names of the birds, animals, plants and insects that were there before colonisation. The garden evolved from a reconciliation group and this is still a strong focus. “There was strong feeling that words needed to be in the local language,” says Julie.

The spiral is just stage one of a larger plan for the mosaic pathway to snake its way through the whole garden, turning into textural sawdust and gravel in the sensory garden and emerging from the ground, in places, to form sculptural sitting places.

Making and sharing art

Located in the grounds of My Barker Hospital and Community Health Centre in the Adelaide Hills, Duck Flat Community Garden is a peaceful haven for patients, visitors and local residents alike.

“The garden has become more of a community development project than I ever imagined,” said Chris Banks, a physiotherapist and the initiator of the garden. “It has been all-consuming, vary satisfying and at times frustrating. The garden has enormous potential to involve community members — people wanting to learn about gardening, to meet others, overcome their disabilities, eat healthy food or just enjoy the ambiance”.

Duck Flat has taken to heart the idea of community gardens as places for making and sharing art. “For those who are not so keen on gardening, we have art projects,” said Chris.

Duck Flat Community Garden's cobb oven and seating

Glove art at Duck Flat Community Garden

Projects have included the hosting of German ecological sculptor, Johannes Matheison, and his team of students which carved a large ‘healing stone’ that depicts the four seasons and the lifecycle of plants through flower, seed, leaf and fruit.

“We also have two dragon seats, built under the direction of one of our volunteers and made from bricks and rubble. A visual arts student has created a very beautiful meeting area with pizza oven and barbecue.”

Recently, Duck Flat gardeners invited eleven local artists to install site-specific works, creating an exhibition called ‘Life Cycle’. Works by Rosemary Toogood, Marcel Booth-Remmers, Devashoan Temple, Joanne Freebairn, Lawrie Toogood, Peter Surguy, Irene Pierce, Evette Sunset, Julie Montgomery and Tis Milner-Nichols can be discovered throughout the lush gardens, providing an invitation to look anew at familiar garden views.

Julie Montgomery’s first impression of the garden was of a “place of nature, a healing place”. She constructed a series of nests — some big enough for a person to nestle down in — from natural materials including human hair dreadlocks which she made from the sweepings of a hairdresser’s floor. The nest shapes echo the gentle ridge surrounding the garden, emphasising its enclosing embrace.

Another of the artists drew attention to the many hands involved in growing this garden, assembling a wonderful collection of weathered gardening gloves.

Local community artist and gardener, Hannah Moloney, summed up the prospects for bringing together community-based art practice and community gardening.

“When I look out my window I see the most amazing living, breathing art exhibition — lettuces, onions, beans, callendulas and herbs, all striking their best pose for the viewers.

“Combine that with some human interaction, colourful flags, mosaics or water features and you’ll soon realise that the best art galleries are community gardens”.

< top

PAGE UPDATED... Thursday, 7 June 2007