THE COSMIC ALLOTMENT by Heywood & Condie: an essay by Tim Richardson

A work commissioned by theCoLAB for the Artist’s Garden, on the roof of Temple tube station, London WC2R 2PH

Exhibition 13 October 2022 - 23 May 2023

Four greenhouses. The organic architecture of old London plane branches as a backdrop. The glittering Thames beyond, glimpsed through the trees. A wide expanse of sky above. The intention is that these greenhouses will act as a portal which leads in to a deeper connection with nature, and the planet. For Heywood & Condie, this installation is also in one sense a narrative representation of their own journey as artists, ending at a point where the self is dissolved into a landscape via a practice of meditation and shamanic journeying.

So how did we get here?

Across a 30-year career, Heywood & Condie has consistently — perhaps persistently — utilised the humble practice of gardening as a means of revealing and analysing the ways contemporary ideas about nature are absorbed into the culture and then reflected back to us as representations. As such, their work reflects years of close engagement with plant life and outdoor spaces. More recently, a strong psychic dimension has been introduced to the work, as the artists try to ‘bury’ themselves in the landscape (sometimes literally) in a quest to find a more intimate connection with the natural world. ‘The Cosmic Allotment’ can be described as a voyage across this artistic career, a compendium of techniques honed over the decades, and also a conduit towards enlightenment, culminating in an ecstatic epiphany.

The concept of the ‘artist’s garden’, perceived — and sometimes conceived — as an extension of sculptural or other work, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In some cases it begins as a setting for the work — an ‘outdoor gallery’ — but morphs into something more: a stand-alone artwork in its own right. Barbara Hepworth’s studio garden in St Ives can be placed in this category. In other cases, the garden effectively builds a narrative which encompasses and defines a body of work. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden at Little Sparta is perhaps emblematic of that approach. In the case of painters, the garden quite often becomes a laboratory for the exploration of colour, light and other effects. This was certainly the case with Monet and his garden at Giverny, as well as with some of his contemporaries, notably Gustave Caillebotte, and those who came later, such as Emil Nolde and Patrick Heron. In England, John Ruskin used his woodland garden at Brantwood as the subject of his minute and intimate appreciation of nature. But an artist’s garden can also address the non-visual, something which can be experienced at Derek Jarman’s garden on the shingle at Dungeness, which seems to speak to concerns which are more cosmic than horticultural. This is perhaps where Heywood & Condie’s ‘Cosmic Allotment’ sits — an installation which constitutes a place, but which also simultaneously transcends its physical surroundings to become a ‘non-place’, to

borrow a phrase from Robert Smithson and Land Art, with which it also has a kinship.

Heywood & Condie’s work has also always drawn heavily from Eastern traditions. notably Japanese gravel and stone gardens, and the Chinese tradition — both of which are concerned with the creation of environments which are both representations of natural scenes, while also seeking to take us beyond, into the worlds of poetry, painting, meditation and self-realisation. This is a world away from the horticultural environment of the English flower show, which is where Heywood & Condie’s installations have occasionally appeared, almost comically out of place amid the prize-winning blooms and garden-furniture stands

Walk through a metal gateway and up a flight of stone steps, on to the expansive roof of Temple tube station. Ranged in front of us, the greenhouse quartet, the outer glass of each structure marked and etched, their interiors intriguingly varied. For Heywood & Condie, the greenhouse, and the allotment in which it might be found, is the gardening equivalent of a temple. These are magical/spiritual spaces governed by (horticultural) rules and rituals, such as watering and 'pricking out'. Replete with dreams of hope, nurture, care, the passage of time and the seasons, a greenhouse requires repeated visits if its contents are to survive and thrive, an investment of time and energy which Heywood & Condie believe constitutes a unique relationship with the planet. Through such ritualised horticultural activities, the artists suggest it is possible to encounter, and more fully understand, the habits of the planet, expressed as continuous cycles of birth, death, decay and potential rebirth.

The first greenhouse (on the left as you face the quartet) is in some ways a reprise of the kinds of forms and expressions which preoccupied Heywood & Condie in the 1990s and 2000s. The most complex assemblage of the four, it contains giant bejewelled sculptures that are scaled up versions of single-cell micro-organisms commonly found in ponds and rivers, 'blinged up to the level of hyper visibility,' as the artists put it — 'a parody on the insignificant, overlooked and unrecognised'.

Heywood & Condie have long argued that, 'we live in a time of superabundance, fast burn and the reign of the virtual. As a result, we are increasingly distanced from ‘real’ nature and likely to encounter it only as a digitally rendered, virtual form . . . For many urban dwellers, nature is now reduced to a ‘sign’, an object or commodity for consumption.' This fundamental lack of connection with nature is expressed here by means of a 'cacophony' or 'jangle' of white marks, glyphs and symbols painted all over the glass surface, each symbol drawn from a vocabulary of contour lines, equations, weather patterns, even botanical illustration -- 'all the rational scientific data that objectifies nature'. The artists' intention is that the glass will act as a visual metaphor for our increasing separation and alienation from nature; the glass becomes an interface, the objects inside desperately trying to communicate with us through it.

The second greenhouse utilises forms familiar from the Japanese Zen garden tradition, though in fact the rocks in this assemblage are tracings of Chinese scholars' rocks. This brings in a reference to meditation as a means of engaging with nature, though the fluorescent colouring of elements of the installation is a continuation of the themes explored in the first greenhouse. The meditative practices

associated with Zen gardening -- raking the gravel, the arrangement and relationship of the rocks within the space -- is echoed here by the marks on the glass, which have arisen from the artists' practice of automatic drawing. This involves spontaneous mark-making following a period of meditation -- incorporating hypnotic drumming and rhythmic breathing -- at a specific location.

'The automatic drawing is like a channelling of what I am feeling and seeing,' Tony Heywood explains. 'It might take on the contours, shapes and forms I see around me but it also has reverberances of memory. Maybe the curves or hard lines might be related to how I am feeling about that particular journey.' Heywood has always been the mouthpiece of the duo’s work, which can lead to the impression that the narrative is his alone. But this is not to diminish the creative contribution of his partner, Alison Condie, who prefers to step away from the limelight, while frequently directing the overall narrative scheme and producing some of the more finely detailed elements of an installation (for example, the bejewelled eggs which appear in the first greenhouse).

If the 'Zen' greenhouse is about a journey inwards through meditation, the third greenhouse expresses a connectivity with the wider universe. The reference here is to stone circles and other Neolithic sites, specifically those found in the British Isles, notably Avebury. For the artists, these ancient, earth-centred arrangements of rocks were originally placed in order to create a sense of belonging and meaning: a relationship with the cosmos. In their view, henges and solsticial sites were both a way of measuring time and space, and a means of giving a particular place a sense of energy through the placement of rocks. Their intention with this third installation is to encapsulate something of that energy.

The final greenhouse can be considered the nominal 'climax' of the piece but paradoxically represents a process of the 'emptying out' of the mind by means of a practice of meditation and shamanic journeying towards a dream-like state. 'It's this idea of dissolving myself into the landscape,' Heywood explains. 'I am not trying to objectify it, but to internalise it.'

The patterns on the glass here are a mixture of abstract wave and dot patterns, simpler forms which are intended to appear to be floating on the glass, hovering above an inner world that is entirely composed of thousands of sculpted clay forms. These spherical constructions reference the invisible world of sub -atomic particles within a quantum field - a simplification of the universe, visually, while also offering the image of a complex web of interconnectivity that is beyond our comprehension.

According to the artists, the fourth greenhouse represents 'the state of conscious unconsciousness you can achieve when you are in a totally meditative state. It symbolises the idea that it is possible to be conjoined with the universe, an animistic way of thinking where you become dissolved into the world, where you let it speak to you, and you become a part of it.' The rock or 'dot' suspended in mid air in the middle of the scene is representative of this way of thinking about the world.

The practices surrounding shamanism have become ever more important to the artists over the past seven years. Tony Heywood describes what this entails:

'To begin the journey, one focuses on an imaginary opening - a hole in the ground - and then imagines a descent into a 'lower world'. At a certain point, when the mind becomes willing to accept the internal imagery, a sudden shift takes place. This new mental state is clearly not conscious but consists of an arrival at a new state of awareness in which you feel that you are not in control but, somehow, being led. Ego and conscious self are no longer the driving force; you have entered into another cosmos, a world that traditional shamanic practitioners would call the world of the spirit, encountering strange lands and animals.'

The Cosmic Allotment, like all of Heywood & Condie's work, is the expression of a deeply felt exploration of the natural world by psychic means. In this respect it stands apart from much of the 'nature-based' work which can be found in the contemporary art scene, replete as it is with with shallowly homiletic commentaries based on an apocalyptic ecological narrative. It is as if to repeat these tropes, or to perform them in new ways, is somehow conceived as virtuous, or the ‘duty’ of the modern artist who wishes to remain relevant and morally on point.

Heywood & Condie, by contrast, reject the hackneyed and caricatural tropes of politicised ‘eco-art’. Steeped in the world of environmentalist thought and practice for the past three decades, their work offers a subtler, more original and deeply felt mode of expression — one in which the artists seek not just to connect with nature, but to immerse themselves within it, and ultimately, to dissolve themselves inside it.