Atelier 29 at the Griffin
I am thrilled to be showing selections from 'Not Just Dirt: the Belmont Victory Gardens at Rock Meadow' with Atelier 29 at the Griffin Museum of Photography, in Winchester, Massachusetts. My thanks to my fellow photographers in the Atelier for their support and - especially - the pleasure and privilege of seeing their work in action.
Victory Gardens
I first encountered the Belmont Victory Gardens looking for a new walk with my family and dog. The idea of tightly packed, fenced community garden plots intrigues me - given I come from the world of large-scale farming, where fields are not measured in yards, but rather in unfenced miles. For me, the Gardens and their environs are a 'micro' landscape. They encourage me to take a more intimate look at our relationship to the land: our tools, its seasons, our cultivation and its produce.
"A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself."
Roberto Burle Marx
Landscape Architect and Artist
Interlude
Growing up on the Minnesota prairie, the spaciousness and drama, emptiness and sometimes desolation of the landscape remains embedded in how I see the world. Finding myself on the East Coast now, the landscape most essential to me, unsurprisingly, is the ocean's open edge. It is particularly salient to me off-season, when the wide, quiet beaches and dry grasses most closely comment on the world of my childhood; especially, that tenuous, transitional time - the interlude when winter hovers and spring hesitates in the distance.