HISTORY OF THE ACCIDENTAL GREEN FINGER

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View the CATALOGUE here.
 

The Joy of Gardening Personified.

 

It feels like I moved out of the city at the exact moment the world changed and my adventure into gardening and finding solace in nature kind of saved my life.

 After 30 years of one desperate geranium on a balcony I found myself with five massive gardens surrounding our new home in Napier in the beautiful Overberg.  Part therapy and part new found excitement, I started planting, investigating, collecting and learning about gardening with a passion I usually reserved for exhibitions and my art. I fell head first into all the clichés of “becoming one with nature” and feeling literally “more grounded”.

 

All this made me realize that I’ve always enjoyed visiting a good garden and that, over the many years of travel, I’ve been to some spectacular artist’s garden, like Frida Kahlo’s and the immensely charming Giverny, a garden that Claude Monet “designed” specifically to paint.

 

The memories of my mother’s Karoo enamel garden with succulents, aloes and cacti, inspired as much this exhibition as the perfectly manicured Rococo gardens of Versailles. The fact that plants have character and personality relating to their environment and their gardener set me off on a fabulous dance of creativity and celebration.

 

HISTORY OF THE ACCIDENTAL GREEN FINGER reflects not only the fondest memories of childhood Karoo gardens, artist gardens from around the globe and my own garden, but also the organic nature of garden blooms and the rhythm of seasons.

 

Truly Organic - At the very beginning planning stages of this exhibition I made the decision to only use repurposed materials and to make this an organic, handmade and tactile art journey that reflect the current and much needed eco awareness.By using only repurposed and recycled materials it gives my work a place in time where we are seeing first hand the impact of human wastefulness, exploitation of natural resources and disregard for the warning signs. We are, after all and despite our intellectual arrogance part of nature.

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 - Alex Hamilton

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