Conversations With Gardens: Artful Spaces in Community Art Education

• In Event: A Transversal Understanding of the International Perspectives on Community Arts Education

Abstract

As the Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens experience combines an historic museum, heritage gardens and an international conceptual landscape design festival, this project aims to integrate artist, visitor, curator and digital media in a unique learning environment. However, introducing a digital platform in a remote and principally outdoor environment involves thoughtful intra-action with its co-constituent communities.

Arguably, the Jardins always already embodied a transversal ethos before the proposed inclusion of digital media in their outdoor spaces. From its inception, the garden’s indomitable first designer, Elsie Reford, challenged conventional approaches to gardening in the Lower St. Lawrence Valley by boldly introducing exotic plant materials that would adapt surprisingly well to the unique microclimate of the region. Honouring Elsie’s spirit of innovation, the juried International Festival of Design was introduced, with multiple conceptual garden spaces adjoining the original botanic site, offering alternative narratives as to what a garden could be (Waugh 2016).

As a possible bridge between media and visitor, and to express the nature of conversations with gardens more fully as an artist, I wanted to explore how both curated and natural sounds might influence what Cluett (2014) describes as “the condition of reception for a work of art” (p. 109) by developing two distinct audio walks, one for each of the major zones. Coinciding with their completion, the Jardins was granted an opportunity to collaborate with the MMFA’s Innovation Lab. This transversal detour in design opened up a process of thinking-making or heterogenesis (Guattari, 2008), multiplying possible ways and means of integrating desired provocations in a kind of tentacular exploration (Haraway, 2016).

The ensuing deliberations around form, content and visitor context are illustrative from a public pedagogical perspective. Through its assemblage of installations and displays, the Jardins reaches out to dialogically encounter the visitor in the liminal spaces, between multiple narratives. Establishing a balance between curated experience and the desire to empower the visitor in co-creating an event-encounter is an uncertain task. Rhetorically, one is confronted with the question of where a conversation, whether real or metaphoric, occurs.

Will permanent multisensorial, interactive stations be experienced as intrusive obstacles, or the desired entry point into a co-created narrative? Digital interface technologies are but one kind of response to the multiplicity of nonhuman and more-than-human agents within the site. While human voices communicate curiosity, wonder, empathy and affect, the nonhuman articulate order and chaos, growth and decay, difference and indifference. The more-than-human voices of the artworks, installations and digital media transverse time, meaning and narrative. For art educators, the Jardins’ intention to integrate and share its digital content in situ is illustrative of a refractive, but potentially more authentic exploration of pedagogies. For the Jardins project, anticipating transversal departures that honour its legacy of possibility is as essential to the process as any design-thinking strategy. Dispositions of patience, comfort with ambiguity and the confidence to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries embrace the complexity and nuance of becoming-with its community, furthering both the real and metaphoric conversations within and beyond its sites.

Author

• Patricia Osler, Concordia University - Montreal