Thinking the Sculpture Garden

Rezensionen / Stimmen

'What happens if you take landscape, art and planting as equals in the Sculpture Garden?' This is the question, 'deceptively simple', with which editor Penny Florence sets out. Essays ebb and flow around these common themes, arranging objects and ideas like Lee Ufan's 'tapestries of intimate breathing'. Gay Watson writes that the Buddhist philosophy of complementarity and the promotion of awareness was a 'core intention' of the Cornish Tremenheere Sculpture Garden - this book's touchstone. Rippling the contradictory opposition of categories that has patterned western discourse on site-specificity and nature-culture relation so far, the intention of this 'other' mode of thinking-writing-breathing is to change consciousness. It's a wonderful achievement with a beautiful structure, pace and energy. Quite unlike any other book on sculpture gardens I know!

Jane Rendell, author of The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017) and Site-Writing (2011) is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

This book is a delight: at once sharply focussed and diffused, it draws together some of the foremost theorists and practitioners of garden design, and invites us to rethink our understanding not just of sculpture in gardens but of gardens as the sculpting of experience. A hybrid volume exploring hybridity, Florence's book combines intense insights and compelling overviews as it ranges from the established excitements of Little Sparta and the Louisiana Sculpture Park to the ongoing creation of Cornwall's Tremenheere, and from the Mono-Ha school to the betweenness of Bernard Lassus.

Professor Stephen Bending, University of Southampton