Turn Your Garden Into An Art Park
As an avid art collector, a former public art gallery director and gardener, it is only natural I would want to turn my garden into a mini art park. I live in Calgary, in an infill house, so I don’t exactly have a huge front or backyard, but didn’t let that stop me.
Vintage playground object, is fun for neighbour children to “rock on.”
“What is an infill,” you ask?
It is a new home in a popular, older neighbourhood, which has replaced with an old, tired house. Generally it is two homes on a lot that had one home, but it can be more depending on the size of the lot. Infills are very popular in Calgary’s inner city neighbourhoods – hundreds are built each year. In my case, it was a 100-foot wide lot that was divided into two, 30-foot wide lots and one 40-foot wide lot. I live on one of the 30-foot lots.
Over the years 25 years, I enhanced (in my opinion) our front and back gardens with artworks, creating what some might consider a mini art park.
Colourful cubist birdhouse on the backyard fence post is cheerful in all seasons.
Front Yard
It first started with the front yard. When I was designing the garden, I sourced two large sandstone rocks to be the centerpiece, where a huge cotton wood tree had been removed.
Each rock was chosen because of their sculptural qualities – one oblong (figure-like) and the other more rounded (egg-like).
Front yard rock sculpture is the centre piece of the garden.
Directing the crane operator they were placed so the oblong one stood tall and leaned on the smaller rounded one, with the intention of creating an ambiguous narrative between them.
The front yard also has two pieces of vintage metal “rocker animal” playground equipment (one from the ‘50s and the other from the ‘60s) that young children used to sit on and rock back and forth. One looks a bit like McDonald’s “Hamburglar” and the other is a turtle, both no longer have the spring that allowed them to rock. They are still popular with the young children getting dropped off at the daycare across the street. They love to wander into the garden to see and sit on them.
The bird nesting box is popular with children being dropped off at daycare across the street.
Another artwork in the front yard is a funky birdhouse created by Calgary artist, Cecilia Gossen. She has made hundreds of them over the years, often for fundraisers. Admiring them in her studio when at an open house she insisted I take one. FYI: These are not birdhouses, she was quick to point out. Rather, they are nesting boxes (as the birds don’t actually live there).
Gossen’s nesting houses are unique in that these boldly painted houses have legs, arms and feet. It is hung in the Mayday tree dangling from a branch on a rope and has been a nesting home to a pair of chickadees each summer.
It has weathered nicely, some of the colours have faded away entirely, while others remain as bright as the day it was installed.
The front porch is bit of an art gallery too. We love to simply prop up an artwork against the house, though I have seen some people actually hang art on the side of the house.
For awhile, we even had a paper-mache folk art piece (I rescued it on one of my back alley walks) on the porch welcoming visitors and those passing by on the street.
Note: After this blog was posted, Verna Vogel an Everyday Tourist reader wrote to me that the paper-mache piece was in fact from a workshop she did with Grade 6 students in Calgary. Here is the story of the workshop and you can see the piece. Link: Life-Size Paper-mache Figures
Backyard
The backyard also includes a number of artworks. The oldest is a 6.5 foot sentinel-like piece made of ceramic and steel by Neil Shaw, titled “Totem.” It is perhaps the only “true” sculpture piece it was purchased from a Red Deer College art exhibition at Calgary’s Muttart Public Art Gallery in 1986. I had the artist weld it onto a low steel pedestal with wheels so we could roll it around the backyard concrete patio.
Our backyard dining table often serves as a pedestal for artwork. Currently, I have glass piece (by an unknown artist) that we rescued from a funky, about-to-be demolished art installation (the house was going to be torn down for a new infill so an artist used it as studio exhibition space for about a month).
Looking like a molecular chemistry demonstration model or a smash-up of Mickey Mouse figures, this fun piece even glows in the evening light.
The backyard is also home to two Picasso-inspired colourful birdhouses (oops – I mean nesting boxes). When visiting friends in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I admired their cubist-looking birdhouses. The host was kind enough to arrange a studio visit with the artist (a retired developer, who incorporated a large workshop in a downtown condo, where he and volunteers, mostly seniors built amazing nesting boxes with all funds going to the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital Foundation). Two came home with us on the airplane. Sparrows nest in them every summer.
And the backyard has a third playground rocker, this time one purchased from a garage sale, who owned an antiquities store. A very strange, almost alien-looking animal is still attached to a spring with a heavy metal plate for the base. The neighbour kids love to rock on it!
While on vacation in Guadalajara Mexico, one day we took a day trip to Ajijic a popular retirement town on Lake Chapala. While exploring we stumbled upon Barbara’s Bazaar that was full of used furniture, home décor and art.
There we found and brought home a well weathered red metal gong on a stand that I thought would be perfect for the garden. Today it sits in a prime spot, next to the garage door.
Several small found stone “sculptures” I brought home from our 1980 trip to Haida Gwaii on British Columbia’s coast have found homes in the garden. I was so struck by the way wind and water had shaped the stone into beautiful miniature sculptures, they had to travel home with me. They are positioned in the garden in different places every year.
Last Word
As you can see, I have combined my love of travel, art and gardening to create a garden art park that is an expression of my life. With a little imagination and savvy, anyone can become the curator of their own art park.
I love how our front garden enhances the pedestrian experience along our street for everyone that walks by. Almost everyone will stop for a few seconds in the summer to look at the art and the flowers. And if we are out in the yard they will often say “Hi” and sometime we even strike up a conversation. How fun is that?