DryStoneGarden

Albizia cycleiferous

It’s tough to be a tree in Golden Gate Park. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was this past weekend. Ridiculously crowded and a lot of fun, as usual. Personal favorites were Doc Watson, Galactic, and an over the top version of ‘This Land is Your Land’ by Tom Morello and Steve Earle.

Metasequoia schwinnii

Stone Sculpture by Edwin Hamilton

I have some photos from the Late Show Gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma, the Bay Area’s new fall garden show, this past weekend. Cornerstone describes itself as “an eclectic collection of shops, wineries and a gourmet cafe set amidst nine acres of garden installations created by the world’s leading landscape architects.” LostintheLandscape has photos from a recent visit here and here. The Late Show Gardens, “the latest in design every fall,” is the new fall garden show hosted there. As they say in their tagline, the show is more about design than plants, and the demo gardens this year were all high-design, high-concept — a dinner table/water feature planted with edibles, a metaphor for global warming, corroded oil tankers and drums repurposed as planters. Garden Porn and Bay Area Tendrils already have photos up, and probably some other blogs, too. The demo gardens were all pretty interesting, but I was most impressed by the stone sculptures of Edwin Hamilton, a stoneworker whose work shows up regularly in books and magazines. Everyone always comments about how building rock walls is like putting together a giant puzzle, but his sculptures truly are put together like puzzles. Very tight.

Late Show Demo Garden

Late Show Demo Garden

Late Show Demo Garden

This one started with a giant block of ice that melted and transformed the space into a reflecting pool, an unsubtle metaphor for global warming. It was pretty effective, actually, because of the cactus; it felt distinctly unsettling to see it in standing water. Kind of messed up to do that to a cactus, but I guess that’s the point.

We were checking out grasses for a couple of upcoming installs. I have photos of the grasses and some more sculpture by Edwin Hamilton below. (more…)

Entrance to the de Young Museum

“Every time I hit a stone, it’s like my heart’s a little bit in my mouth.” Andy Goldsworthy

This Andy Goldsworthy installation, “Drawn Stone,” at the de Young is from 2005, but I didn’t have a blog back then and I’m generally slack about going to museums, so it’s just now that I’m checking it out and posting about it. Goldsworthy’s stone installations are always interesting to me, the way he often manages to (knowingly) break the rules about stonework while still remaining very attentive to and respectful of the craft. For instance, with “Drawn Stone,” the entire focus of the installation is a crack that runs through the sandstone pavers and slabs of the museum’s entrance. Installing a cracked paver is considered poor form, but he’s reveling in it, making it the entire focus of the installation. And in fact, it must have taken a lot of extra effort to crack the pavers and then match them up, so he even earns bonus points for doing something that would normally be frowned upon. Pretty bold.

The installation was originally named “Faultline,” but Goldsworthy changed the name along the way. I don’t know anything about the reasons for the change, but it seems like he somehow found out that Californians don’t really like earthquake-themed art, and so he decided to keep that aspect more low-key, the way Californians like it. In this case, it’s totally appropriate to have an earthquake theme — the new de Young was actually built because an earthquake made the old building unsafe — but it’s more in keeping with the local aesthetic to keep that aspect out of the title. And the piece is overall fairly subtle, anyways; several people didn’t notice it until I took out my camera and started snapping photos.

Goldsworthy is always an interesting talker, and KQED’s website has a 2005 segment about the installation with him talking about learning to break pavers (the best way is to just whack them with a hammer) and other aspects of the piece. The museum website has his artist’s statement along with a photo of him on top of one of the slabs, holding a sledgehammer, with the wedges and feathers still in the slab. It’s a fair bit of work to split a slab that big, but it must have been satisfying. Photos of cracked pavers and slabs are below. (more…)

The stoneworker’s artist-of-choice, Andy Goldsworthy, has a new installation in the Presidio. It’s pretty cool, a one-hundred foot tall spire made out of forty lashed-together Monterey Cypress logs, culled from aging, declining trees that needed to be cut down. After cutting them down, they lashed them together into the spire and planted new trees around it in the spots where they had cut down the old ones. The spire will eventually rot and have to come down, but by then the new trees will have grown up around it. 

From now until May 3, there’s also a small exhibition with some of the drawings for the project, some photos of the installation process, and a few small art pieces including this junior spire inside a closet of the exhibition building. 

The NY Times has an article with a nice photo of the spire. This video has some footage of Goldsworthy’s first log spire, the no-longer-existing Grizedale spire.