Defiant Gardening

1942, London, a bomb crater becomes a garden.

Source: Imperial War Museum

Officer Brook Turner tends to his lawn in a US army camp near Baghdad, 2004
Photo: Neil Sperry

All credit to everyone else for this post. I've had to do very little but re-present it, which I normally hate doing, but this deserves it. Really fantastic stuff.

Thanks to Scott Webel at the Museum of Ephemerata for his email way back in the summer after he looked at my Tanks & Tablecloths site and suggested that I might be interested in Alexander Trevi's post on Pruned, I discovered something called defiant gardening. The Pruned text will also lead you to Ketzel Levine's article for NPR and where it all began - with Kenneth Helphand's book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.

It's a lovely concept - albeit associated with the grizzly horrors of war. Helphand's book demonstrates that both soldiers and civilians caught in the chaos and destruction of war will - in what could be viewed as an act of defiance - struggle to create natural spaces, in which they can tend vegetable gardens but also nurture a need to exert some control over a situation that is often way out of control.

Belgium, 1918, a soldier paints trees on the side of his army hut.
Source: Imperial War Museum

2003, Ingushetia (Russia), a Chechnyan woman tends a white-stone garden.

Photo: Simon Norfolk

1990-91, during the Gulf War a green tarp forms a lawn, pinned down with sand-bags.
Photo: Don Smith

Salt to start with

Yesterday morning I received a postcard from my friend Anne:

Photo: Woytek Konarzewski

In fact I didn't know what a fleur de sel was, and had to do a bit of searching. (This site describes the production of a salt flower, if like me, you don't know what it is and want to understand the poetic title of the image above. And the text is quite charming, something like very good English, with a few creative awkwardnesses.) Essentially it is a salt for gourmets, created in the salt marshes of Guérande (meaning in Breton, white country) in Brittany. Salt flowers are the young salt crystals which form naturally on the surface of the pools, when a hot, light breeze blows across them.

Fleur de Sel has been created by Anu Tuominen - the postcard jogged a memory from way, way back. Her name has been mentioned to me before, but I never followed it up. What a loss!

I was struck by two things…

Firstly, her great use of puns within the titles of the work (a little like Cornelia Parker, the titles make the meaning of the pieces fall into place). A series of crocheted dinner mats remain attached to the the balls of thread that form them. The balls sit in a selection of mismatched egg cups. The title is Eggtempura on Canvas. She seems to have a way of looking at language, at twisting it, playing on its' idiosyncrasies and re-presenting it back to the viewer from a new angle. It's like her world view is from far above, or crawling underneath or through fog. In a way her view is simpler. Somehow she has a different perspective on reality - she makes an unreality out of things that are very much present and real, and associated with domesticity and the living.

Source: Galarie Anhava, Finland

Secondly I simply like the way she presents her work. It's very simple, but well-considered. And all based around the theme of the kitchen.

Source: Art-U Room, Japan

Source: Onoma, Finland

When I completed my MA I always wanted to make an exhibition of work about a particular room. The room would be filled with objects exploring and challenging the essence of the everyday things that we surround ourselves with. I was fixated with doors that made the viewer contemplate what a door was, windows that were at odds with their purpose, clothes that were actually words and welcome mats that made the floor a mess. When I was researching at the British Library I was obsessed with the parlour - a room that now no longer truly exists as it once did: a room for special occasions, but also which would have been at the heart of the Victorian domestic setup.

Gradually I moved away from the idea - thinking perhaps it was too literal as a container for the sort of work that I was producing. But seeing Tuominen's work has opened up the possibility again, for I think she's managed to create a domestic feeling space, without labouring the point, still managing to be discrete enough.

For more information about Anu Tuominen, look here and here.

It's also worth looking at Karsten Bott and his Archive of Contemporary History. And here at One of Each, a book he's published about domestic objects. There's a similar sort of aesthetic happening in his work.

The First Day

In honour of the coming of autumn, the new academic year, pristine school uniforms and countless pairs of as yet unscuffed shoes. A few pictures, to remind those of us who no longer go through this ritual, of how we once felt on our first day back to school.

Ever since working on Once More, with Feeling I've been collecting photographs of children dressed in school uniform, posing for a first day snapshot. I pick up the photos wherever I find them, so I don't know who most of the subjects or their photographers are. But I suspect that the majority are taken by an apprehensive parent, of an also apprehensive offspring, who is desperately trying to remain composed beneath a façade of bluster or apathy.

The location selected as a suitable backdrop is most often the garden or outside the home, indicating that this is a quick snapshot, not really something that is necessarily thought through at any great length. The image of the boy in front of the patterned material is the only exception: this was found on the web. These photos are documentary gestures: they're not about anything more than capturing that moment just before everything changes (as we are apt to believe it will when we get sent off to school). Sometimes the pictures might also be taken after the big day, when our progression to adulthood has already taken its first faltering steps.

I look at those kids' faces and their postures: mixed signals, from fear to pride, glee to boredom, reluctance to delight, and I know I experienced all of that. School really is both the beginning and the end.

I collect these photos with a view to making a project about them, so if you'd like to submit your old school photo to be added to the collection, please email me. All photographs will be credited where possible.