My grandmother, Jennet Nordstrom Brooks, tended to her garden for 40 years with artistry and adoration. She cultivated it with homespun techniques she learned growing up in rural Sweden. My grandmother often expressed her discomfort as an immigrant, but communicated easily through her garden. She chatted with family while picking snap peas, gifted neighbors with currant juice, entertained me with handcrafted flower crowns, and honored my grandfather, John, on his birthday with a cake covered in homegrown raspberries. Two years before I began work on this project, my grandmother yielded to dementia and moved out of her home into a care facility, letting the garden lie fallow. My grandfather stayed and sustains what he can–a few pepper and tomato plants, some rhubarb and raspberry bushes.
Within this context, I worked for two weeks in the garden. I suspended two painted steel bars between plywood panels and the surrounding fence–inverted moon gates that frame the overgrown land, or gestures that read as pictorial drawings in space, like figures in the garden. ‘Satellite’ paintings and assemblages made of found, repurposed, and organic materials engaged unnoticed sites: the space between two fence pickets or vegetable beds, the sod covering once-healthy onion bulbs, rusting tomato cages, rotting crabapples on the ground. The viewer meanders through, discovering what already existed as much as what I created.
Photographer Adam Kremer documented the work and garden against the backdrop of the annual Experimental Aircraft Association air show at the local airport a few blocks away. Adam and I worked in the sun and rain, alongside my grandfather who snacked on apples while watching colossal planes and shrieking fighter jets fly overhead. The still moments felt just like another conversation with my grandmother.
The garden is mysteriously medial and ever-dynamic. It is situated between lifeless and overgrown, domestic and natural, ordered and wild, once conserved and now covered in clover. Amoria is a taxonomic synonym of the common clover (Trifolium). It is a name no longer in use, a trace of a scientific history of naming that still searches for specificity. The garden continues to become. –LK
Works:
Half Moon, Compilation
Half Moon, Curtain
White, Coming From
Green, Coming From
Half Moon, Vertical
Yellow, Leaving Out
Blue, Leaving Out
Half Moon, Red, Yellow + Blue
Half Moon, Green + Yellow
Of the Columbine
Of the Dame’s Rocket
Of the Painting on the Fence
Of the Fence
White, Between
Pink, Between
Half Moon Sequence 1
Half Moon Sequence 2
Half Moon Sequence 3
Half Moon Sequence 4
Fence Sequence
Framework 13
Framework 14
Framework 15
In the Garden
Materials:
Acrylic on canvas with mesh collage on fence
Acrylic on canvas, mesh, and 1x2 on fence
Acrylic on canvas stretched onto vinyl tubing on fence
Acrylic on canvas stretched onto vinyl tubing on fence
Acrylic on mesh stretched onto stick on fence
Acrylic on steel on fence
Acrylic on steel on fence
Plexiglas and screw on fence
Plexiglas and screw on fence
Gouache on canvas in fence
Gouache on canvas in fence
Gouache on canvas on fence
Oil on canvas on fence
Acrylic on 2x2 in fence
Acrylic on 2x2 in fence
Cement paver, plexiglas, and acrylic
Cement paver, plexiglas, acrylic, pinecone, crabapples, and cherry tomatoes
Wood plank, plexiglas, concrete rock, brick rock, and acrylic
Steel, trimmer line, acrylic, and brick dust in soil
2x2, mesh, and acrylic on fence, and pine tree
Plexiglas on steel tomato cage
Plexiglas on steel tomato cage
Plexiglas on steel tomato cage
Acrylic on 20 ft. steel bars supported by 3 x 4 ft. plywood boards in ground and 8 ft. 2x2, steel stakes