Esterni Design Partnership Blog

As the winter evenings darken the garden, it’s worth thinking about  lighting, as a way of providing intensity, drama and visual pleasure.

You can highlight the structure of the garden, specimen plants such as grasses and trees or provide notes of colourful, sculptural interest.

Below are a collection of images to brighten up all our evenings, with the promise of interaction and play once the weather and temperatures turn towards spring and summer…

Images are courtesy of CASA&DESIGN

This week we are back blogging, after  long and thought-filled summer recess.

With this post we return to the core of the esterni aesthetic, back to the inspiration drawn from fine art, design and the expanded notion of gardens as spaces of imagination, where, in Tom Stuart-Smith’s words “different processes apply”. The current exhibition at the British Museum on German Romantic prints, was an impulse visit. I have always been drawn to the poetry and craftsmanship of the images, and their interpretation of  landscape and the sublime in nature, long before esterni came into being.

The images of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, which he termed “vegetable sheets”,  illustrate  how the art context can provide eclectic and unusual imaginative links and inspiration for secret, private, gardens.

Here is an idealised version of nature, where light and dark, scale and detail mesh with the human form and spirit.

The prints and drawings on display capture beautiful, poetic scenes, exploring landscapes and wildlife to heroes and folktales. Romantic artists took inspiration from earlier artists, including Albrecht Dürer and Raphael.

The image below is titled “I too was in Arcadia”. The text in the museum relates two opposing interpretations of the Latin “Et in Arcadia ego”: the positive, ‘I too have visited this Eden’, as in the work below. The original interpretation of the Latin, however, was known to be words pronounced by Death, signifying ‘ I am [present] even in Arcadia’, a memento mori from earlier times.

While it is interesting to speculate on which interpretation to ascribe to this, the most accomplished print produced by Kolbe,  it is also of note that the artist wrote in later life that all the vegetable and floral images were all drawn from imagination, never once from life. Naturalists abhorred his work, and Kolbe regretted not having taken a more documentary approach.

Viewed in a contemporary context, we have the makings of the hermetic garden, expressing the idea of the imaginary subconscious being like a garden, closely linked to our contemporary understanding of gardens as a private zone in which we can indulge.

Images  courtesy of the trustees of the british Museum and aestheticanova.com

For some time I have been really interested in the work of Polly Apfelbaum, a NYC artist who has built a body of work between painting and sculpture, through the use of fabric, cut, dyed, drawn and placed.

This latest work has become more abstract and in some ways more linked to responding to the site: stretch sequin fabrics are cut and placed in the gallery, interacting with the architecture of the space, involving viewers in the glow of the light, in negotiating the spacing of the pieces, in revelling in the simple scale and seduction of the composition.

These works were preceded, in 2005-2009, by complex installations of cut synthetic velvet shapes, often as diagrammatic flowers, in monochrome or tonal compositions.

Increasingly,  esterni will be developing and disseminating more of the cross-disciplinary links found between art and design and design for landscape, for horticulture and planting. Here we are highlighting the use of scale, colour relationships, form, easily understood for their link to gardens. Flora has been an intriguing subject for artists, as seen in the previous post, one I have been very familiar with in the field of textiles, and that I am growing to understand more about. Plants and their shapes as the changing and growing medium of a contemporary art form.

I leave you to revel in these glorious prints of abstract flowers, a riot of composition, scale, colour harmonies.

All images copyright: Polly Apfelbaum.