Germinating memories
Artist in Residence at Hamilton MAS, Felixstowe Heritage Seafront Gardens
Wednesday 19th August
This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn and the Friends of Felixstowe Gardens, a team of dedicated volunteers who meet each Wednesday throughout the year to tend the gardens. Chatting to them, it was fascinating to learn each person’s motivations for working in the gardens- friendship, commitment to roses, civic pride, physical and mental wellbeing. Such a warm group of people who have been brought together by an appreciation of those fabulous gardens.
I asked Robin if he felt the gardens were nostalgic. He was quick to challenge that term, confirming that for him, the essence of being in a garden was about the here and now, how the senses are activated. His suggestion encouraged me to reflect on how the experience of moving through gardens can provoke a form of time travel.
So many of the comments that I have been offered by viewers of my work during the residency include strong childhood memories (from peeping through a removable knot in a neighbours garden fence to memorising the moments before the impact of a motorcycle accident) Extraordinary comments that I had could not have predicted but have got me thinking about the Proustian nature of Art.
A local resident, Alaster, had been arrested by the large drawing ‘Nymphaeum’ which he generously said had been a drawing he wanted to make himself in response to a descriptive passage from the prose Ex-oblivione an H.P. Lovecraft novel that he really enjoyed. These drawings are so tightly bound with my personal experience of the gardens at Villa Gamberaia I am unable to associate them with another space. Some time later that morning, he surprised me with a hand written quote from the book in question which he felt resonated with my drawing.
‘Many times I walked through that valley and longer would I pause in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely and the ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould stained stones old buried temples and always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein’
I subsequently listened to an audio version of the prose after which I could start to appreciate why Alaster might have connected the drawings with the content and atmosphere of the story.
One of the fascinating and productive outcomes of working in a public facing space is how generous visitors are, offering a completely new perspective and throwing a new idea or connection like a stone in a pool.
