Garden Varieties
(Script for an artist talk given 20 Jan 2024, as part of Eat, Play, Love, for Singapore Art Week 2024)
Hi everyone, thanks so much for being here. And thanks very much to Michael, Ngiap Heng, and Aishah for making this all possible. I’m Catherine, I made the sculpture that is outside in the garden.
When Michael first approached me about this show and told me what it was about I was really excited, because I’m personally quite interested in architecture. Or rather, I really enjoy learning how architects talk about their work. I feel like some of the themes architecture deals with overlap with things I’m interested in as well—stuff like public vs private, inside vs outside, intimate vs monumental, permanent vs temporary—working on this project gave me a chance to dwell on all of that for a while.
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During my first site visit I saw a couple of structures in the back garden that had been built for vegetables to grow on. It was four bamboo poles in the ground with a lattice of raffia string linking them together at the top. It’d looked so much like a mini-building to me, with four columns and a horizontal roof. What stuck with me was this image of an architect building a structure for people to live inside, and then those people building a smaller structure for plants to live outside. I just found that to be a very compelling image—these two levels of ‘building’ going on at the same time, almost rhyming.
In the end I landed on the idea of making something like one of those bamboo structures in the garden, but shaped like that very Modernist house behind it. I wanted a way to sort of compress those two levels of ‘building’ into one thing, so you could look at it and see both.
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I used to work at a building in Toa Payoh near the vegetable night market (that sadly closed last August). There was a BTO estate being built on that street. Between the construction site and the road there was a patch of grass where the workers had planted a small garden, and one of the structures they’d built there was almost exactly like the one I saw here. There was a morning glory plant growing over it, and it formed this canopy that was so thick and lush it was basically functioning as a shelter from the sun. I went back to get a photo of it after I knew I would be working on this project but by that point it had already been dismantled. They were laying pipes in the ground underneath.
So I had that structure already rattling around in my head as I was going into this project. I was thinking about the idea of building (both noun and verb), about what we consider Architecture, about who is building what, and for whom, about things that are meant to last and things that are not. And of course I was also looking at the bamboo scaffolding still used for construction in Hong Kong, which is absolutely crazy to me. They are so beautiful but I can’t imagine how complicated they must be to build, and how high the stakes are (literally).
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There's this quote I remember seeing from an interview with the author George RR Martin (who wrote the Game of Thrones books), where he was asked about writing and his process. I'm paraphrasing a little bit here but he’s talking about how different authors approach writing. Quote: “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time… they have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows.”
It’s not super relevant but I guess I thought it was interesting how I tend to think of ‘architecture’ and ‘gardening’ as such different things (and in many ways they are) but they can also be quite similar in other ways too. I guess it’s another one of those imperfect binaries, architect vs gardener. It makes me think about the Crystal Palace in London—destroyed by fire decades ago and still considered one of the most innovative architectural feats of the 19th century—which was designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardener. He’d spent his early career designing greenhouses for the various foreign plants being brought back to England from her myriad warmer colonies. (He also cultivated the Cavendish banana, which is that variety of banana you’re probably picturing when I say the word banana.)
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In my practice I often find myself looking for points of connection between concepts that may not be instinctively thought of as related to each other. I’ve likened this process to making puns, where two different words happen to share a sound, and they end up creating a pocket of space where both meanings might exist simultaneously, where one thing could mean two things—a momentary lack of certainty. I think greenhouses might be my point of contact here, between architecture and gardening. Greenhouses, and also those structures I saw in the back garden of this house.
