For Chelsea Flower Show, Hospitalfield arts organisation collaborated with award winning garden designer Nigel Dunnett to present a show garden that doubled up as an outdoor artists’ studio and workspace, reflecting both the surrounding landscape of Hospitalfield’s location in Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland, as well as its longstanding history and ongoing work as an important supporter of artistic practice in Scotland and beyond.
An undulating series of raised sandy mounds are planted with wild cultivators, mature pine trees and sedums which snake throughout the garden. The mounds cocoon around a paved open space to the front of a wooden bothy or shed structure. With sand spilling out onto the open area of paving and a recess of pooled water, the garden reflects the shoreline merging of sea, foam, shail and soft sand dunes.
Hospitalfield is a residency space that supports artists to develop their practice alongside hosting a public programme. Their collaboration with Dunnett for Chelsea introduces the flower show’s wide audience of over 160,000 visitors to Hospitalfield’s charitable mission to support artists of both current and future generations. Dunnett’s collaboration with Hospitalfield further makes visible that closely entwined with this mission is the endeavor to encourage a critical engagement with the locality of place and to invite close attention to our interactions with the land and its inhabitants, beginning with those in at Hospitalfield’s own vicinity, the walled garden, fernery and paddock.
Hospitafield has previously worked with Dunnett on the redesign of the walled gardens at Hospitalfield House. The historic garden, cultivated since the building’s foundations as a monastic hospital in the 12th century, is a central part of artists and audiences’ experience of the place. Far beyond being simply a physical space, the garden and its surrounding ecology is harnessed as the impetus for Hospitalfield’s public programme. A programme of walks, talks and workshops including an annual Grow Up Summer School, Study Day and Summer Festival populated with invited artists and speakers with the objective to introduce new voices into the local context in order to provoke discussion on global issues around land, climate and creativity.
Woven into Hospitalfield’s residency programme is a two year studio commission, working with artists over an elongated period to develop a significant new work. The organisation’s commitment to investing in the development of artist practices that connect to the locality whilst reflecting upon global issues and discourses, focuses on the connection between art, horticulture and nature as a space to foster new practice and enables critical thinking about our shared place in the world. Artists undertaking the commission have included Rehanna Zaman, Jade Monserrat and Hanna Tulikki. Through the commissioning programme each artist has actively engaged with the local ecology of the site and the wider region of Angus, to present works that in one way or another question, critique or reframe our relationship to ‘nature’, whether as a western construct tied up with the complexities of colonialism, as the fantasy of an endless resource for the commercial exploitation by agricultural industries or as a tangible world of multiple, often unseen instances of joy.
Like most contemporary practice, artists working with the land, plants and growing stand in one way or another within a larger tradition. Artists have been working with the place of the garden and the gestures of gardening as a means to explore critical questions around human development for some time now. Contrary to the merely visually pleasing and comforting focus of many horticultural designs, such artist’s gardens have often been sites to reflect upon and question narratives about the interconnection between people, plants and land. As a space that is never still, a site that constantly grows, shifts, decays and transforms in line with a burgeoning flora and fauna, gardens have long been able to function as sites of radical critical arts practice. From the early work of Land artist Alan Sonfist and his transformation of an abandoned lot in the centre of New York City into Time Landscape (1965-78) or Liz Christy’s greening of empty spaces in the Bowery area of Manhattan (1975), artists have again and again, reclaimed gardening as a meaningful expression of a commitment to more sustainable futures.
It is perhaps no surprise then that in our current moment of climate crisis an increasing number of artists are engaging with similar questions of how to inhabit and interact with the more than human world in an effort to critique, reflect and reframe our relationship with the visible and non-visible worlds around us, as well as to acknowledge the impact of, as Daisy Hildyard eloquently frames it, our ‘second body’. In the face of climate emergency, a more recent development of this lineage is the increasing interest of artists in indigenous practice and knowledge, using ritual and magic as a way to critique capitalist rationalism and extraction. Rehana Zaman’s Studio Time commission at Hospitalfield is one such example of this. Zaman extensively researched with cultivators local to Hospitalfield in Arbroath to examine the enduring legacies of colonial capitalist land use and ownership in the UK, from multinational monopolies on farming practices and plant patents to the relationship between the Scottish clearances and plantations in South Asia. Encompassing moving image and performance, Zaman invited writers and poets Seán Elder, Nat Raha and Daniella Valz Gen to dialogue with Al Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things, an influential work of Islamic cosmography from the 12th century. Each artist presented a new piece of text, performing to the Festival audience in nuanced, esoteric and intimate readings, reorienting how relationships to land, configured through capital, are subverted and felt.
Hospitalfield’s efforts to critically embed itself within the locality of its site, fostering new perspectives and an active unpicking of given histories, marks a significant difference to the currently popular proliferation of art organisations incorporating growing and gardens into their creative programmes. The steady rise in organisations developing ‘gardens’ or working with artists on the creation of green spaces in the aftermath of the covid pandemic has been widespread, with wellbeing initiatives and a surge in social prescribing offering new opportunities for funding. A turn towards gardening initiatives in the arts is furthermore part of a vital effort to foster connection to nature at a time when the climate emergency is increasingly felt. Yet far beyond merely carving out green space as part of its engagement initiatives and climate responsibilities, Hospitalfield actively seeks to critically embed the site and concept of the garden into the visitors, staff’s, artist’s and participant’s experience of the organisation itself.
Dunnett’s garden design, which is rooted in his longstanding practice of horticulture, enables Hospitafield to have a presence at Chelsea Flower Show, a national event in the gardening calendar. In doing so he significantly helps to introduce the important work of Hospitalfield, engaging visitors through the familiar language of horticulture design to present an opportunity for critical reflection on the role of the arts more widely. Central to Dunnett’s design, cocooned within the planted dunes is a bothy intended for use as an artist studio. For the duration of the flower show, artist Bob and Roberta Smith temporarily relocated their studio into the bothy structure. Works referencing their practice of campaigning for the arts in education are strewn across the interior: witty slogans on painted placards and colourful children’s drawings. Not simply another design within the mass of show gardens at Chelsea, Hospitalfield’s participation invites audiences to reflect upon vital questions around access to the arts and, in particular the place of art in education. After its initial presentation at Chelsea the garden is being re-built at a local primary school in Arbroath, in a way reintegrating it with the landscape that served as its inspiration. The school will use the bothy as a space for regular artists workshops or residencies. Here, the artist studio will hopefully serve as a site where learning can take a different form to the traditional, regimented regime of the classroom, one where the creative and critical tools of the arts are placed in the service of inventing new relationships to the soil, plants and landscape of a future climate.
Accompanying Dunnet’s garden design, visitors are provided with a plant list. Part of a horticultural tradition, plant lists function as guides to the gardens, enabling visitors to take away details of each design. Working with artist Lucy Skaer and designer Rachael Adams at Scrutineer studio, Hospitalfield produced a piece of print that both fulfills the function of the plant list expected by Chelsea audiences and simultaneously presents as an artist’s print. Woven across the list, abstract watercolour shapes mirror the trestles and fronds of different plant species. The design provides yet another point for reflection around creativity and the role of the arts to foster new relationships to familiar histories of horticulture and our engagement with more than human worlds - critical considerations that lie at the heart of Hospitalfield’s programme, ethos and vision of the future.
The garden is sponsored by Project Giving Back, the grant-giving charity that funds gardens for good causes at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
