The Garden

The Garden asks how expanded forms of gardening, whether that be gardening as research-creation, ‘feral’ art practice, fostering new communities, addressing mental health, and, or resistance to capital all interact with the ever-challenging effects of climate change. Here the ‘garden’ may be considered to engender the co-production of care, activating communities alike in their struggle to address the intersectional challenges of the present and build new futures. In what ways can gardening shed its Western bias and become the basis of creative engagement and evaluation to insert meaning into the experience of ‘living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing, 2017)? Can gardening become an agent of action, capable of negotiating the overwhelming sense of anxiety and paralysis that emerges from a confrontation with the collapse of planetary systems?

This issue of Drain is also inspired by the queer activist, filmmaker, and artist Derek Jarman and his concept of ‘modern nature’. Partly articulated in his garden project at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, UK, a coastal site adjacent to a nuclear facility, ‘modern nature’ pushes boundaries and collaborative status between gardening as rewilding nature, time, and contamination (Jarman 1991; Laing 2020). Jarman’s concepts intersect with narratives of care, of bodies in despair, grief, but also of the possibilities of entangled futures. As such, we welcome a range of intersecting queer, feminist, post-colonial, and Indigenous perspectives to explore the ethical and ontological concerns raised through vibrant material and symbolic exchanges that operate at the site of the garden. Can such a collision of territories in which we confront the cultural separation of human and more-than-human dwellings allow for an exploration of the distorted and abused connections that have shaped our experiences of ‘modern nature’?

ABOUT THIS ISSUEï»ż

Editorial Essay
Editorial – Celina Jeffery

IN THIS ISSUE

Feature Writing
Contemporary Nature – Gabriel Sacco

Essays
Art-gardening in Aotearoa: a topography of social-art-gardening practices and two fertile case studies – Mikayla JournĂ©e
Anselm Kiefer: Barjac comme un Jardin-Atelier de monde – Mehdi Sharafi

Thought Experiments
Pieces of Eden: Making Gardens – Where Gardening and Installation Practices Meet – Deborah Margo

Interviews & Reviews
“Modern Nature” and the Self-Portrait: Adam Ash Barbu and Neeko Paluzzi in Conversation – Adam Ash Barbu
The Garden as both Site-Specific and Transcending Place: Interview with Zainab Hussain – Anna Paluch
Laura Fritz: Verdure – Elizabeth L. Pence
The Willfull Plot, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia-Vancouver – Desiree Valadares

Art Projects
Planting Roses in January – Curatorial Project
Indelible – Sandra Gregson
Area Rug – Zainab Hussain
Aerosol Parasol Jump – Carolyn Lambert
The Coves Collective – Michelle Wilson
S’y Retrouver – Jinny Yu, Ki Jun Kim, and FrĂ©dĂ©ric Pitre

Creative Writing
roots of roots – Saanya Chopra
Edges and Views – Anna Reckin

This issue was edited by Celina Jeffery

Icon image – Jinny Yu, Ki Jun Kim, and FrĂ©dĂ©ric Pitre, S’Y RETROUVER,
24th International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis, Québec, 2023.
Photo by Martin Bond.

I would like to thank RA students Saanya Chopra and Jury Kobayashi for their assistance in editing and uploading this issue. Secondly, many thanks to Emily Igawa for her expertise in managing the website.

THE GARDEN – Vol. 19:2, Jan. 2024

This issue draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada.