New Blog Post:

Before I get really into this new piece I’ve been tying up the ‘geranium project’, I started with a map and plotted the pathway through the different spaces now that I’ve rendered them as separate with their own weather, and introduced doorways to the next level. I’ve also registered as a developer on Viveport and submitted the VR world as an Art & Design App for review. If it’s accepted it will be available for free to anyone with a Vive and will also allow me to point people somewhere to get it when I enter competitions and look for exhibitions. I had to develop a visual identity and supply all sorts of images as well as filling in lots of forms and uploading a zipped build file. Fingers crossed.

Map of the Geranium Project

geranium viveport thumbnail

geranium landscape image

Gardens Project: Preamble.

For a while now I have wanted to make work that explores the philosophy of the garden. Artists as varied as Joan Miro and Derek Jarman have had a strong attachment to garden spaces, not to mention Monet, Cezanne, or Ian Hamilton Finlay. It seems to me that as a person matures whilst they retain their breadth they can seek to contain or centre themselves in a more defined space. This is not generally a place to hide, it is rather a high point from which to view the world.

I have begun thinking about a mixed reality artwork built around a series of gardens and hung around an autobiographical framework. The piece will present a ‘player’ with a pathway through different locations in a virtual world built for HTC Vive and Occulus(?) that represent particular times historically; 60’s, 70’s, 80’s etc., and particular times of life; early childhood, teenage, young adulthood and onwards. The separate gardens will contain evidence from my history and the wider world in the form of photographs and headlines, and be soundtracked by contemporaneous music and news sources. Each garden will be accompanied by a physical sculpture developed from these sources and each of these will act as a trigger for an Augmented Reality piece elucidating the sources.

I am interested in the way we build ourselves into our spaces and our spaces into ourselves as we age, and through this what the environments we choose lead us to and from.

I’ve been reading for background and I’ve put a bibliography at the end of this piece.

This is a video of a draft I made to put forward for exhibitions and funding.

Reference list

David Edward Cooper (2011). A philosophy of gardens. Oxford Etc.: Clarendon Press, Dr.

Jarman, D. and Laing, O. (2018). Modern nature : the journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-1990. London: Vintage Classics.

Miró, J., Yvon Taillandier, Lubar, R.S., Lippert, K.C. and Reeves, J. (2017). Joan Miró : I work like a gardener. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Young, D. (2019). Philosophy in the garden. London ; Minneapolis, Minnesota: Scribe Publications.

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