As well as having a reputation for presenting the best in international contemporary art, the South London Gallery, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year, has never lost sight of its original remit “to bring art to the people of South London”. Both strands come together with the unveiling earlier this month of a new permanent garden designed by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. Two years in the making, and created with the support of Kew Gardens and architecture firm 6a, not only does this project convert what was a rather unprepossessing yard at the back of the main gallery building into a unique and immensely versatile sculptural garden, but it also introduces a new entrance for residents of the neighbouring Sceaux Gardens housing estate. The co-founder of 6a, Stephanie Macdonald, worked on the gallery’s earlier expansion and will be overseeing its conversion of the former Peckham Road Fire Station into an annexe. She and Orozco speak to The Art Newspaper about the capital’s first artist-designed public garden.
The Art Newspaper: Gabriel, is this the first time you’ve designed a garden?
Gabriel Orozco: I have worked with gardens in many ways, but have never built one up from zero. It’s not the same as working in your own private space. You can call it an artist’s garden but it’s not my ongoing private garden that I modify or change; it is something that you leave open, a public space for multiple purposes. In a way, it’s a working sculpture that behaves like a garden.
What was your starting point?
I was trying to find the order that was implicit in the environment. So the first thing that I did was trace a drawing with a grid that related to the proportions of the surrounding buildings. Then within that I started to think of possible circulation paths of people in different situations like at an [exhibition] opening, or just having a coffee in a quiet moment. I put in the discs as a way of activating these movements and interconnecting the paths. I also wanted to change the levels so it stopped looking like a flat backyard and more like a landscape. I was trying to generate a wilderness in a very urban landscape, to make it organic but also functional.
Stephanie Macdonald: At the beginning we worked together through what was already there. Gabriel was picking up details of brick on the surrounding buildings, and we looked at the way sites get taken over in south London: there’s often a derelict space or an infill and they get really wild. We had an old bomb map and saw that this was an old bomb site, so there was already the history of finding the gardens, the back gardens and the old ruins—the traces of what was there before. So there was always this discussion about Gabriel’s order, but also about it being overgrown by the garden and becoming more ruinous.
This idea of a ruin seems to be an important one.
GO: I always liked the idea of ruins, of recovering and recycling things. It’s not a ruin in a dramatic, theatrical way, but more a kind of eroded landscape that has been shaped by people and the circulation of things, whether architecture, machines or nature. In many backyards or public spaces, you can find moments of abandonment, when things are not maintained and plants grow in the corners. This can make a garden look more interesting because it’s removed from the dictatorship of the human: nature starts to fight back, and time gets involved.
The layout of the garden in segmented interlocking circles seems close to many of your paintings and drawings.
GO: The plan looks like a drawing of mine. It’s similar to the way I use discs or segmented discs to activate the space in a canvas, or in a drawing—or even a sculpture when I work. Here I traced a basic geometric grid and used six discs with dimensions based on the arc of the door as it opens out from the gallery’s Clore workshop. The landscape also becomes a kind of board game that you are activating when you are walking through or looking at it. So then in a way we made a board game out of these circular forms.
These interlocking circles and many of the constructed elements—the benches, stepped seating and planters—are made from uniform brick-sized blocks of Yorkstone.
GO: The stone is cut to the same size as regular brick, creating a connection to the walls of the surrounding buildings. There is also a hill, a pond, a welcoming bowl and a little puddle. Then you have a sink and the benches, but they are also like little hills. I was interested in dividing the garden into rooms so you can have some quiet moments of privacy—or kissing time. We [managed to] divide the garden into rooms using the brick-sized stone parts and the discs and the axles.
How did you choose the plants?
SM: We walked around Kew Gardens together so everything we chose was already growing in a UK, south London environment, although many [species] originally were from across the world. Gabriel’s choices were more about the kind of leaf and the sculptural quality of the plants, as well as the aspect of the garden’s different rooms and of course the movement of the sun.
GO: I am not an expert on plants and my take was more around choosing how they will grow together in connection with the grid we have on the floor. The planting again follows the pre-ruin idea. I liked the idea of weeds and moss growing in between bricks, nothing too bulky or heavy, but things that might be growing in an abandoned lot and provoking the sense of a place where plants start to take over and generate new rooms and new moments which will change over the years, with many surprises in between.
So will this garden need much tending?
GO: It’s not a nostalgic garden, it’s not an enclosed private romantic garden and it’s not a Zen garden in a temple. It’s a public sculpture that works with its surroundings in a very different way than if it were in the centre of London, a corporate building or a big museum. We are in the middle of south London and we cannot control that and we don’t want to. So you have all this unpredictability and all this noise that becomes part of the garden. I told everybody that this is a garden that should be maintained by the needs of people who are living in it; it doesn’t belong to the artist any more.
• Gabriel Orozco Designed Garden, South London Gallery, Peckham; accompanying exhibition, until 8 January 2017