CUL-DE-SAC
2009
Cul-de-sac: scrutinizing the human compulsion to control nature in the suburbs
‘Neatness has always been the suburban gardener’s main preoccupation, and hard surfaces, geometry and structural simplicity will guarantee a neat result for minimum outlay.’
Peter Timms 2006, Australia’s Quarter Acre, p.95
Humans have an innate compulsion to control and civilise nature and in an urbanised society this instinct is most often played out in the arena of the front yard. Nature, represented here primarily by plants, is hedged to military precision, geometrically imprisoned or concreted right out of existence.
Backyards are private spaces for relaxing, entertaining and practical pursuits such as growing fruit and vegetables and hanging out laundry. The front yard by contrast is a public space, a display area with few practical purposes, the perfect arena to show domestic pride and flair, revealing much about the gardener’s personality and attitudes towards nature. The front yards shown here are unpopulated (as front yards are), with the occupants at work, school or inside watching TV, implicated by their garden design and maintenance regimes (or lack of).
People who would never consider themselves artists create large scale living sculptural spaces and spend decades of their lives taking care of them. Either with a master plan or in an ad hoc way, they design their domestic installations with line, colour, texture, form, repetition of geometric shapes, symmetry, balance and style. Banal plant choices are frequently coupled with gravel, paving, walls, fences and edgings resulting in disciplined rows of plant prisoners inserted at equidistance and anchored into beds of imported river pebbles or trapped in concrete collars.
A fascination with the development and design of urban spaces has led me to ponder why some of these strange practices have come into existence, such as the ‘lawn tongue’, the thin strip of lawn down the centre of a driveway. Why bother creating this strip of lawn that requires mowing and edging? Why not concrete the lot? I’ve discovered the practical purposes it has for those owning cars with oil leaks but it is still hard to imagine why someone would set a concrete swan into a bed of paving, manicure a host of spherical shrub balls or choose to live surrounded by a wasteland of lawn monoculture. Nonetheless I derive a great deal of amusement and pleasure from these absurd and wonderful constructions whenever I walk the streets of suburbia.
Photographic grazing on Hobart’s suburbs feeds these constructed images of an amalgamated suburb you’ve seen everywhere and nowhere in particular. Rather than houses in the landscape these human sized photographs are portraits of the home(owner). Shot from the footpath, the viewpoint of the passer-by, the installation creates a cul-de-sac to rival any Tidy Towns entrant.
Cul-de-sac examines the peculiar and amusing results of the compulsion to civilise and control nature as witnessed in the quiet recesses of the suburbs. It simultaneously celebrates the kitsch, familiar and reassuring in the Australian vernacular of domestic gardens and architecture.
Cul-de-sac, examination exhibition, Masters of Art, Design and Environment [MADE], Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania.
Exhibited: Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art and Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart.