Q&A: Altered States with Heywood & Condie
Heywood & Condie are horticultural installation artists.They have been making weird gardens together since 2000. Their work includes floating sculptures on the Serpentine, installations at Lords cricket ground, at sea and in woodland. In their joint show with Tabatha Andrews, Altered States, they bring to London their 2015 work The Greenhouse, made from salvaged stained glass, as well as a theatrical new ‘anti-garden’ installation. The exhibition is held by the Royal British Society of Sculptors, the oldest and largest organisation dedicated to sculpture in the UK. The company supports artists by providing bursaries, a mentoring scheme, awards and residencies. We asked Heywood & Condie to tell us about the show and about their avant-gardening…
Eli Goldstone: Tell us what to expect from your latest installation, The Postnatural Garden of Unearthly Delights.
Heywood & Condie: The new work is a sort of extreme garden / landscape - part real, part synthetic. This horticultural installation fills the entire gallery to create a completely immersive environment drawing on all the senses. We hope viewers will be surprised, excited, amused and potentially disturbed by the piece, which draws on elements of the surreal and the psychedelic. It's a disturbed garden for disturbed times.
Eli: What’s involved in your collaborative process?
H&C: Our differing backgrounds in anthropology and human rights intersect in the world of conceptual horticulture. We spend a lot of time discussing ideas and processes but most of the time it feels a little like a constant game of moves and overlays. The final works are definitely more than a sum of two parts. Sometimes one of us will work alone on a piece or a particular aspect and take it forward, especially if there is a creative block. This way we often come to appreciate the unexpected, more so than if we were 'lone workers '. It also gives the creative process a sense of momentum. Anticipation and surprise are good emotions to have on board and the way we collaborate allows this into the mix.
Eli: In The Greenhouse you’ve created a sacrosanct space out of a mundane object: what do you hope people will reflect on when they step inside?
H&C: We always saw this as an interactive environment. The greenhouse is such a symbol of nurture and care. We discovered that the space has a very calming effect - maybe we discovered colour therapy by accident. The mirrored floor, reflecting a stained glass fragmented imagery of hybrid animals and plants, is visually rich with folkloric symbols and shapes. I think people will enjoy sitting, lying back and floating with these otherworldly forms. We hope the piece will tap into the archaic part of our psyche.
Eli:Previously you’ve experimented with shamanism: did that inform your work at all?
H&C: We have both spent time at Shamanic retreats which we don't really spend time talking about publicly. Shamanism isn't a religion in any sense, it's a meditative tool which encourages wild thought by tapping into our unconscious - encouraging dreamlike memories to play an active role in the everyday - a sort of alternative version of reality. It is a very nature centred practice and our work is about finding new ways to engage with nature and land, with our installations often being driven by responses to a place. The shamanic journey could be considered as another creative tool. However it’s not something that informs all of our work by any means.
Eli: Is there something spiritual about getting your hands dirty?
H&C: Both our hands and minds are filthy if that answers your question
Eli: There is a perceived conservatism in the world of horticulture. Do you feel that your work goes some way to disrupt that?
H&C: If you mean horticulture as in the gardens at Chelsea Flower Show then yes - the garden as a fine art has fallen from grace. Our installations are gardens in the 'expanded' sense of the word. We use the garden as a medium to communicate our ideas. This particular work uses the conventions of the carnival to upturn or lampoon the notion of the garden as a bucolic retreat and pastoral idyll. Most gardens serve to bolster up notions of security and the status quo. We wanted to create a garden piece that challenged those traditionally held notions.
This is a landscape of attack, not retreat. It’s about our current dysfunctional relationship with nature and land. In this way, whilst traditional aesthetics are a key part in seducing the viewer, our gardens are not to be admired purely for their horticultural qualities. We hope our gardens express something significantly more relevant, culturally. They may include performance and ritual. Their form and the unusual materials used bracket them outside mainstream landscape or garden practices.
Eli: Is there a certain pleasure in ‘unmaking’ the spaces in which you exhibit?
H&C: Aren't we always unmaking, rethinking spaces? This is part of the urban situation. Space is constructed from a palimpsest of ideas and forms, memories and associations. We want people to be suddenly thrown into this 'other world'. For this work we hoped to capture a feeling of revolt, as if the space of the gallery was hosting a riotous event. Only a solitary burning candle anchors the gallery and provides a real grounding. The work is physically suggestive of the processes of change.
Eli: Do you feel that digital landscapes are encroaching on our sense of place in the world?
H&C: We live in a world of short bursts of information in the way of vines and memes. Our living world is subject to the distortion and airbrushing of the media. Nature is now experienced second hand. Disaster movies, the zoomed-in hyperreal world of wildlife programmes, or the airbrushed vistas of the holiday brochure now determine our experience of the real. We're often disappointed when we go into real nature as it doesn't measure up against the digital images we hold in our heads. Our work is a sort of criticism of this as well as an acceptance of this de-natured situation.
We're experimenting with ways of representing our new mediated relationship with raw nature. We need to rethink this distanced experience. Our exaggerated landforms - often highly embellished, even jewel encrusted - are an exploration into synthesising the digitally hyperreal and living plant material to create a new, synthetic hybrid form more relevant for 2016.
Altered States runs from the 6th of June to the 26th of September at the Royal British Society of Sculptors