Beauty Spot - Fine Art Society (FAS)
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
BEAUTY Spot, a new horticultural-based installation by artist Tony Heywood will be on display in the Fine Art Society’s London gallery space from March 18 to April 7, 2009.
Components of the landscape include four tonnes of pine needles, a nine foot fountain, five giant gnarled pine trees and a tonne of beach sand.
As Heywood attempts to re-create and re-examine the natural environment of his childhood in Lancashire, he comments on our increasingly mediated and remote experience of nature.
Beauty Spot invites the audience to walk through a cartoon-like landscape before encountering grotesquely distorted micro-landscapes in bell jars. These Victorian style miniatures are packed tightly with crystallized bonsai trees, anthracite, bejewelled sculptures and tattooed micro-organisms. A series of three short ‘scratch garden’ videos provides the link between these two worlds.
The works in Beauty Spot reveal a complex and painstaking artistic process: Heywood makes multi-media collages of imaginary landscapes, photographs them and then cultivates living horticultural environments based on the images. These environments provide a theatrical set on which performances take place. The performances – which usually involve the destruction of the garden – are filmed. Cuttings from the films provide inspiration for the intricate micro-landscapes in bell jars.
The installation, Heywood’s second solo show at FAS, represents the artist’s desire to stamp his own mark on our changing perception of landscape. As Heywood himself explains:
“In our multi-media world, nature is frequently portrayed in a grossly exaggerated, often highly perfected manner and I wanted to describe, and occasionally ridicule that desire for bucolic perfection – the visual equivalent of lounge music.”
In an integrally related sideshow Heywood presents his latest colour-field video paintings of choreographed poured-paint, inspired by herbaceous flower borders.
Heywood’s large-scale, living and dying garden art installations have been generating rising interest since 1999. In his last exhibition, Unfinished Symphony (2007) alongside artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman and Gavin Turk, Heywood presented a glass case with a sculpture of a scaled 1950s New York Skyscraper inside containing a time bomb of rare seeds.
In Super Algal Bloom (2006) Heywood presented a floating exhibition on the Serpentine in Hyde Park of giant bejewelled forms based on the minutiae of algae and plankton. These sculptures formed his first exhibition Shimmer at FAS by way of installation on the front gardens of the Tate.
Former Head Gardener for the Hyde Park Estates, Tony Heywood now works in a studio beneath Platform One at Paddington Station where he creates and cultivates his garden installations. His recent awards and commissions include, Cork European City of Culture (2005) Belfast Botanical Gardens, Chaumont International Experimental Garden Festival France, Future Gardens Award (2009).