THE IMPOSSIBLE GARDEN (2022)

“We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday.”

– The Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909)

In their desire to throw off the restrictions of the past and artistic and creative conventions, the Italian Futurists of the early 20th century opened the way for radical new forms of artistic expression, influences of which can be seen in exhibition IN-MOTION: Art of the Space Age that opened in Stellenbosch in 2021.

Even the extreme events of the decades that followed could not blunt the optimism of a movement, based on a belief in the wonders of science and science and technology’s potential to benefit humanity. How do we understand the beauty of this belief in progress— and the real benefits it has brought—with the price it exacts?

Technology delivered new materials and media for artists too, spinoffs from the vast industrial-energy complex, but the planet paid the price in environmental degradation and global warming. It felt appropriate to respond to this call in a medium that encapsulates this terrible bargain – plastic.

The brilliant artificiality of Giacomo Balla’s The Futurist Garden is the inspiration for these works, an “impossible garden”, made not of polychrome wood, but plastic in its various consumer incarnations.

These 19 “plants” function as individual sculptures, but are most powerfully experienced as a collection, a modular installation that forms an impossible garden. Here too are artificial plants in a futurist garden. However, developing from ideas raised by Balla’s garden—with its still somewhat naturalistic stylings—the plants in this impossible garden resemble perhaps lifeforms that might be found on alien worlds. Yet, the individual plastic components are immediately recognisable, the tops and packaging of the products we consume daily.

Impossibly bright and fade-resistant colours are seductive in a rather sterile way; without scent or subtlety of texture. And yet they remain objects both of beauty and of redemption, repurposing the plastic that would otherwise pollute the landscape and thereby retaining some of the original optimism and hope of the “space age” envisioned in the early 20th century, whilst acknowledging the impossible price we pay in the choices we make daily.

Impossible Garden Plant VII
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
62 x 40 x 40cm

Impossible Garden Plant XVII
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
60 x 33 x 15cm

Impossible Garden Plant XII
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
83 x 35 x 15cm

reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
106 x 35 x 35cm

Impossible Garden Plant XIX
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
60 x 33 x 20cm

Impossible Garden Plant XVIII
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
105 x 30 x 15cm

Impossible Garden Plant XV
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
52 x 42 x 14cm

Impossible Garden Plant XI
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
52 x 28 x 28cm

Impossible Garden Plant XIII
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
62 x 23 x 15cm

Impossible Garden Plant IX
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
88 x 20 x 20cm

Impossible Garden Plant VI
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
83 x 40 x 30cm

Impossible Garden Plant XVI
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
82 x 52 x 52cm

Impossible Garden Plant X
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
100 x 60 x 23cm

Impossible Garden Plant VIII
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
65 x 35 x 35cm

Impossible Garden Plant XIV
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
43 x 16 x 13cm

reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
24 x 40 x 40cm

Impossible Garden Plant I
reclaimed plastic, steel wire
72 x 52 x 20cm

Impossible Garden Plant IV
reclaimed plastic, steel wire, concrete
24 x 40 x 40cm