China Bower |
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| The garden paradise is an illusive construction of memory created
from experience and a dream of perfection. It is a glimpse of the
world that is infinitely variable and individually selected to include
only those aspects most desired. Imagined in perpetual bloom, it is
a focus of unattainable longing. It provides pleasure to the senses
and the soul and helps to define the self. |
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In my garden paradise lies a white china bower: a dwelling, an inner room, a female space closed in with foliage. The bower reads virginal white glistening in the sunlight, but closer scrutiny reveals the contradiction of colourful patterns of permanent blooms painted on small china fragments. The bower form echoes the painted rose foliage on its shattered surface and the rose bushes it reaches towards. Nestled within a verdant carpet of soft, fragrant foliage, the bower settles and is grown over in time. Unchanged, fragments rise to the surface again with frost and spring cultivation, offering glimpses of promised perfection. Rigid, sharp and otherwise useless, they are physical remnants of once chosen, impossible ideals: perfect beauty, perfect manners, perfect wife, perfect hostess, perfect home and garden. Why are these things in my version of paradise at this time? What life experience has brought me to a difficult acceptance of them as part of my role? I have grown into the work and quiet pleasure of tending a garden, but how do I deal with the responsibility of the accumulated remnants of another life? Used, these things are no longer pristine or valuable; they are too much work to maintain as intended, and collected they clutter my life with a history of choices desired by another. Despite rejecting those values, I am burdened by the physical trappings of it. Amassed, they threaten to overwhelm, but they can never be completely disposed of, even broken, they have a charm to enslave. There is a poignancy in the delicate hopefulness of the painted blooms and a quiet loss in their fragmentary nature. That place, that time, those people can never return: I don’t know what another knew by heart. |
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Tenderly the living ground covers enshroud the shards. My garden’s territory is safely traversed in contemplation of botanical comparisons in living and representational forms. I am lulled by edges grown over in time and a new history created. But then, just as I come to believe in this peaceful paradise created, a shard shocks with a chance memory. A celebration...the work, the tensions? Or the offering of a gift of a special meal, presented on a fragile heirloom, a mother’s or grandmother’s treasure. In my garden paradise, the shards are reminders of the risks and the pleasures of giving and making choices.
China Bower is a personal paradise laid bare in a public place. Individuals stop regularly to look and choose a souvenir. “Who would miss a tiny shard in that quantity of broken china?” Perhaps they desire a memento of a day at the public park, a person they were with, a pretty pattern. Perhaps also a china fragment cuts through to a paradise of memory, inspiring need and a desire to possess. The China Bower is theirs. |
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Recent additions to Identification Collection. All paintings 3" x 3" |
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