Artist’s Garden

This summer, an unpurposed garden plot beside the Museum entrance is getting an artist’s touch. The Museum has commissioned Simon Frank, a Hamilton-based multidisciplinary artist, educator (at Cardinal Heights Elementary School) and recipient of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award for Visual Art, to create a site specific installation.

The artist proposed a planted work, titled Untilled, comprising diverse perennial plants and ground covers, each chosen for their specific colour and texture. Untilled references a watercolour in the Museum’s collection by Paul Klee.

Says Frank, “Klee’s abstracted landscape was directly inspired by his travels in North Africa, and the array of colours he encountered in the Tunisian landscape. With Untilled, I will reverse this process (and return the favour), drawing my inspiration from the way he uses colour in the work, and translating it back into a small, living, growing landscape.”

The work also references an experience the artist had while traveling by train through the Netherlands. “I saw rows of pure colour (tulips) stretching to the very distant and flat horizon.”

McMaster students and Museum docents will assist Frank with the planting and maintenance of the garden installation through the summer.

Simon Frank is a Scottish-born (Glasgow 1968), Canadian artist whose contemporary landscape-based work draws from a broad range of artistic and cultural traditions, to explore the complex relationship between nature and culture. The natural environment provides Frank’s continually evolving artistic practice with an aesthetic frame of reference, and the source of both raw materials and inspiration. Much of his recent practice has concentrated on process-oriented works, which when enacted in a public space, take on elements of performance and ritual.