Background
I've been interested in horticultural images for a while and have an ever growing collection of old rose and chrysanthemum guides, the ones where the colour plates look Technicolor, and over the last few years these have inspired me to create paintings and videos on the theme. In creating the ‘Winter Garden’ however, I thought it was time to come out of the pictures and go in search of the real thing. My ambition in creating this virtual garden, my Winter Garden, was to brighten up a few winters evenings with a full colour spectacle of flowers and present something a little unexpected but hopefully beautiful to the viewer. Creating this piece has given me the opportunity to meet some amazing local gardeners and I was privy to the knowledge, imagination and sheer devotion that goes into the growing process, which I would describe as a mixture of science, sport and romance, importantly I wanted to convey a sense of the extraordinary things that some people do.
I spent many summer days chatting, taking photographs and filming across the Rhondda Cynon Taf area and I am very grateful to the following gardeners for their time and generosity: Eirwen Godfrey from Pen-y-Coed Cae who passionately loves her summer garden and especially her roses; John Kelland who has a bountiful allotment in Tonteg where he grows an abundance of fruit and vegetables as well as sweet peas; Ivor Mace from the Rhondda Valley who is a well known local gardener, growing prize winning roses and vegetables, he is also eighteen times British champion chrysanthemum exhibitor; and Mike Thompson a prize winning rose grower from the Rhondda Valley, Mike has over five hundred rose bushes planted on an amazingly steep hillside which he terraced over a period of seven years, Ivor described Mike's garden as a sort of pyramid. Selections of this material together with documentation of the Rhondda Rose Society’s annual show, with all its formality, beauty and fragrance, now constitutes the winter garden.
Previous temporary public art has included ‘The Silver Dream Machine’ which involved converting a Citroen CX into a three seat cinema and in ‘From a Distance it Seems All Quite Nice’ I created a miniature version of a Victorian swimming pool in a Victorian hotel bedroom.
