Making shared gardens as an expanded art practice.
Carly Glovinski and I met in 2002 when we attended Boston University’s BFA Painting program. We lost touch and then magically reunited years later. While catching up, we discovered that we have parallel art practices with themes that revolve around garden culture, plants, and the landscape. We even share the same journey of abandoning painting on canvas and choosing instead to work on paper, create large-scale installations and public artworks, and then return to canvas. Our only differences are our concepts and artistic languages.
In 2021, Carly started a living art project, Wild Knoll Foundation Garden, located at Surf Point Artist Residency in York, Maine. Wild Knoll is literally planted on the footprint of the late poet Mary Sarton’s home before it was torn down. Carly still continues to nurture and maintain it today. I had the privilege of visiting and experiencing Wild Knoll last summer when Carly invited me to do an art activation within the garden. To me, Wild Knoll was like living proof of what a harmoniously established ecosystem filled with native plants looks like, with joyous varieties of birds and insects happily pollinating, juxtaposed against the yet-to-be-managed parts of the property that were overcome with non-native plants.
Seeing how successful Carly made this garden further intensified my own botanizing fever. It also made me want to know how Carly came to get bit by the garden bug and how the physical act of gardening influenced her latest work, Almanac, which is currently on view at MASS MoCA, as well as Opelske, a living and mosaic public artwork located in the Boston Seaport. We also spoke about her solo exhibition, Into the Garden, at Morgan Lehman in New York City.
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Read the full interview at bombmagazine.org.
