Where are all the flowers going? – to London, eventually… |
SOMETIMES ON HOT summer days in big cities, it can be almost painful to think about the countryside – like the idea of water to a man stranded in the desert. The landscape artist Tania Kovats, who lives and works in London, perhaps knows that feeling, and that may be why she’s arranged this summer to break off a little piece of wildflower meadow, and float into the East End on a narrow boat.
MEADOW is the first commission for Bath Sculpture Garden, an initiative of Bath Spa University’s School of Art and Design led by the sculptor Michael Pennie. Students and staff at the school, working with Kovats, have sowed specially adapted trays with a mix of June-flowering wildflowers. The trays will be lifted at the beginning of June and installed on Betelgeuse, a butty boat, built for the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company in 1935. The boat will be pulled by canal tug down the Kennet & Avon Canal, leaving Bath on 11 June and drifting into London three weeks later.
Kovats’s comments on MEADOW are as beguiling and elliptical as the piece itself: “ When you move through a landscape does it move through you? This is a question I return to again and again. MEADOW does not answer the question but slips through the space between a question and an answer.”
MEADOW is both an idea of a landscape and a floating miniature landscape itself. Recalling Robert Smithson’s Floating Island barge project – a little rectangle of woodland that floated round Manhattan Island last September – MEADOW will, say its creators, “trace a line in the landscape, making a connection between two places, and leave a trace of its journey in the mind of all those who encounter this floating garden”.
Appropriately enough, for such a gentle piece of work, it’s in no hurry to reach its destination – the tug and its cargo of flowers will moor up at many places along the route, and the artist will deliver workshops at selected locations along the way, as part of Bath’s “City of Festivals”.
Other traces of the journey will be down to the local bees. For those of a botanical bent, MEADOW is carrying, among other species, corncockle, cornflower, oxide daisies, rocket, mint, sorrel , clover gallium tetraxican and viola. On completion of the journey, the plants will be returned intact to the plot they came from. |
