Art and Nature

It’s 7 am, and I am climbing a 30-metre mound in the suburbs of Sapporo, the capital of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The snow that blankets the city through the winter has only recently melted. The breeze is warm, the grass bright and eerily well-kept. I gaze towards the mountains framing Sapporo’s towers, registering how they rhyme with the triangular form I am ascending. Reaching the top, I glance down, where a plaque announces ‘The General Summit for Imagination’.

Moerenuma-koen (Moere Marsh Park) was the last work of Isamu Noguchi and in some sense is also his catalogue raisonné.

In 1988, just months before he died, the Japanese–American artist made a tiny model of his grand plan for this former waste disposal site. Surveying the park and its gardens from this mound, which Noguchi titled Play Mountain, it is easy to see why this monumental endeavour took another two decades to construct. It encompasses sculptures, monumental earthworks and a dozen playgrounds, which had preoccupied Noguchi for more than half a century. Noguchi saw the park as a single work, a joyful argument for sculpture and site as fundamentally fused, for art as something to delight in, to feel and experience as much as to see. While watching children playing on one of his marble slides at the Venice Biennale in 1986, Noguchi is said to have laughingly observed to designer Issey Miyake, ‘Kids learn a lot about sculpture with their butts.’

It is 2014, and I am sitting in a curatorial meeting in St Ives, near Britain’s southwestern tip. I have recently moved to work at a small outpost of the Tate and am learning that I am also responsible for the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. I listen to a debate — apparently earnest — about how lasers might be deployed as a seagull deterrent. I look out of the window, at hooded surfers bobbing on the waves.

Artists had been moving to this small fishing town since at least the mid-nineteenth century, lured by a new train line and cheap lofts as much as by the peninsula’s famous light. But it was not until the sculptor Hepworth and her circle relocated there, in flight from the Blitz, that St Ives became indelibly connected with British Modernism. Hepworth lived and worked in her Cornish studio-cottage for several decades, carving in its lushly high-walled garden. In her later years, as her assistants took on more responsibilities, Hepworth would guide their chisels not by eye but by ear, calling out directions while pouring another drink. When Hepworth died unexpectedly in 1975, her studio and garden opened to the public less than a year later.

The studio and sculpture garden that Hepworth bequeathed presented a conundrum to curators and conservators. How do you preserve a garden? Should it be frozen in 1975 or should it be allowed to grow? What to do about the bronzes, patinating alarmingly rapidly in the salty Cornish air? And what to do about those seagulls? A garden is, after all, very different to a climate-controlled white cube. It is an unpredictable ecosystem, shaped by the shifting climate. Noguchi and Hepworth: born a year apart; creators of an expansive sculpture park and intimate sculpture garden. Both are summations of a life’s work, posing the kinds of slippery questions that sites of this kind often pose: how does art live in relation to the land? What survives of us? What do we mean by ‘us’, even?

Imagine we are wandering through such a garden. Our guide might suggest that the first sculpture gardens began to take root across East Asia a millennium or so ago. These were located in courtyards, which would frame containers holding miniature landscapes: tiny renderings of sacred mountains and rivers, dotted meticulously with bonsai and various dwarfed plant life. (Perhaps a garden is always a microcosm, an attempt to shape or apprehend the world beyond, a way of bending nature into culture.) Our trusty guide, skipping forward several centuries, might add that Renaissance-era European sculpture gardens were mostly the work of wealthy families. In the fifteenth century, the Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti declared that gardens in country estates should include ‘vases and amusing statues, provided they are not obscene.’

But it was not until the postwar period that the form became standardised, as sculpture gardens became familiar appendages for museums. Look to the Kröller-Muller Museum (in Otterlo, the Netherlands), one of the largest sculpture gardens in Europe. When it opened in 1961, the Kröller-Muller’s founding mission was to survey sculpture ‘from Rodin to the present’. This lineage included many artists — Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Mark di Suvero, Richard Serra, Richard Calder — who remain staples of sculpture gardens everywhere, from Storm King Art Center in upstate New York to Chateau La Coste in Provence. Surveying European and North American sculpture gardens of the 1960s to perhaps the 1990s, a more critically minded tour guide might be forgiven for dismissing this phase as ‘large metal things by white men’.

In the face of these orthodoxies, there were of course always acts of resistance, suggestions of how the sculpture garden might be imagined otherwise. Among my favourites: in 1969, visitors to the Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York were confronted by a group of naked bathers, writhing in a fountain and embracing one another as well as a reclining bronze. The title of this unauthorised Happening, orchestrated by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama? A Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead. It continues. As I write, I read that Joan Jonas’s performance Mirror Piece I & II, also from 1969, is being reprised in the exact same spot, among MoMA’s fountains. For Jonas, the work turns the audience into a reflection, ‘making them uneasy as they view themselves in public.’ At their best, sculpture gardens continue to be spaces for reflection that can also fracture and unsettle.

In the last decade, a number of more progressive institutions have begun to view sculpture gardens as places to seed emerging approaches to transparency and environmental sustainability. Near Antwerp, Middelheim Museum’s Art Park now has an ‘open-air depot’, an outdoor conservation area where sculptures are taken for care and repair — a kind of public hospital for sculptures. The gardens of the National Gallery in Kamberri/Canberra were originally designed in the 1970s, as a sequence of 26 ‘outdoor rooms’ echoing the museum’s floorplan; in 2024, an architectural design competition to redevelop the gardens was announced, recognising the foundational importance of Australia’s First Nations peoples and culture. At the Walker Art Center’s Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the museum commissioned a site-specific work by Angela Two Stars, the first Indigenous American artist in its collecting history. Envisioned as a space for gathering and for repair, Okciyapi (Help Each Other) 2021 is a cast-concrete labyrinth containing works in the Dakota language. As Two Stars said: ‘I specifically chose this site with the awareness that there was a need for healing — for both the community and the land itself.’

Those sculpture gardens that remain, for me, the most moving and enduring tend to be small-scale, often remote and usually made by singular artists. On the desolate shingle shores of Dungeness, in the shadow of a power station on England’s south coast, clings Prospect Cottage, a black-painted fisherman’s cottage. This was the home and final project of artist, writer and filmmaker Derek Jarman — ‘the last alchemist’, as his partner Keith Collins called him. Around the cottage is a small garden, which Jarman began to make soon after being diagnosed as HIV-positive. Here he gathered together small circles of dolmen-like flints, twisted lengths of rusted metal, collections of driftwood. In this inhospitable edgeland, Jarman’s garden is an act (or an art?) of defiance, made in the face of storms and salt.

Inscribed with a sonnet by John Donne, Prospect Cottage is a place of allusion and poetry. A kindred spirit is Little Sparta, the sculptural sanctuary in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, which was dreamed into being in 1966, when the artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and his wife Sue Finlay moved there with their young family. Today, Little Sparta contains almost 300 artworks, made in collaboration with stone-carvers and typographers, as well as artists and poets. Everything you see appears to be inscribed: plaques, paving stones, obelisks, planters, bridges. The garden historian John Dixon Hunt has written that ‘the ideal gardener is a poet’, while the Finlays themselves called Little Sparta a ‘garden poem’. The name ‘Little Sparta’ sets this endeavour into cheerily rivalrous relation with nearby Edinburgh, which was once nicknamed the ‘Athens of the North’. A garden is not a retreat, Hamilton Finlay liked to say, but an attack.

This critical bite is a feature of many artist-designed sculpture gardens. In the late 1980s, the remarkable artist-educator Noah Purifoy — already in his seventies — left his native Los Angeles and moved to a barren parcel of land in the Mojave Desert, a two-hour drive east. There, in the final 15 years of his life, Purifoy set about constructing the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum, one of my favourite artworks anywhere in the world. I have returned several times (once almost getting sunstroke in the dry desert heat) to explore its 100-plus sculptures and assemblages, composed entirely out of salvaged junk. As Purifoy’s one-time neighbour, the artist Andrea Zittel said, ‘Noah knew how to work with all the complications of the desert — the solitude, space, extreme elements, decay, and the lack of audience.’ In this distorted vision of the United States, mordant and creaking, we find versions of the White House, the Library of Congress, the Statue of Liberty, a gas station, a gallows, all cobbled together from cast-offs. ‘Isn’t this America?’, Purifoy seems to ask.

Some sculpture gardens start out as secrets, only finding their audience over time. In the late 1940s, soon after the Partition of India, a young roads inspector named Nek Chand Saini began to collect rubble from demolition sites around Chandigarh. Broken pipework, strip lights, bottles, tiles, bicycle frames, pots, sinks — there was a lot to choose from, as the city was in the process of being redesigned as a modernist utopia by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Over the years, Chand began to fashion his finds into constructions, tucked away in a gorge just outside of Chandigarh. Slowly, this shadow city grew, inspired by a vision he had had of the divine kingdom of Sukrani. For almost three decades, his activities were clandestine, but when in 1976 the project was discovered by the authorities, permission was retrospectively granted, along with a team of 50 assistants. It continued to develop until Chand’s death in 2015. Across 30 acres, more than 2000 figures dance: monkeys and elephants proliferate among waterfalls and mosaic courtyards. Today, Nek Chand’s once-secret Rock Garden is one of the most visited cultural sites in India.

This visionary streak flows through the genealogy of sculpture gardens. The ur-text may well be Sacro Bosco, known as the Parco dei Mostri (Park of the Monsters), a mannerist garden on the grounds of the castle of Orsini, in the province of Lazio, Italy. Here you will find monstrous forms, ogres and mythic gods, all sculpted directly from the valley’s bedrock. (In recent years, Simon Moschino has been identified as the artist behind this singular undertaking.) Commissioned in the sixteenth century, Sacro Bosco was forgotten and became overgrown until Salvador Dalí made a painting and film in the 1950s, after which it was restored. Since then, it has become a touchstone for countless artists.

One of them was Niki de Saint Phalle, who visited soon after Dalí. As a young woman, the French-American artist had been committed in the 1950s to a mental clinic in Nice, where she was forced to undergo electroshock therapy. In the late 1970s, de Saint Phalle began work on The Tarot Garden, inspired by visions she had experienced there. On the 14-acre site of an Etruscan ruin, an hour or so west from Sacro Bosco, she embarked upon a project that would preoccupy her until her death in 2002. What she conjured there comprises a sprawling castle complex, dappled with mirror shards and olive groves and rainbows, each sculptural form representing a different form from a tarot deck: the Sphinx, the High Priestess, the Magician. It is, as she wrote, ‘A sort of joyland, where you could create a new kind of life that would just be free.’

It is 1997, and I am visiting The Tarot Garden with my parents. I have no idea that de Saint Phalle is still alive, living in California now, and that this will be her great last work. Or that this garden is still growing, a work-in-progress. Because it seems to belong to both the future and to an utterly ancient past. A sort of joyland indeed, another realm.

This an exclusive first-read of a story to be published in The Annual 2024.