The Lines, Threads & Traces of the Garden (2024)
Loose-leaf publication in collaboration with Peter Kærgaard Andersen.
Published together with Rønnebæksholm Kunsthal.
Peter Kærgaard Andersen, PhD and artist, and writer and image maker Helene Johanne Christensen created the loose-leaf publication based on their joint residency in the garden of Rønnebæksholm Kunsthal May–June 2023. The box contains a pamphlet with an essay, letters to the compost and a climbing plant, a garden poem, postcards, stamps, photographs, digital works, and garden exercises. All of the material was developed by the artists during their residency in the garden.
Inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book Lines, in which he describes the living world as consisting of lines, the artists set out to create a speculative mapping of the garden’s lines, threads, and traces in order to better understand the garden and its human and more-than-human inhabitants. Part of the ambition was to gain insight into how all the threads, all life forms, are entangled with one another, and how they collectively contribute in shaping the garden. The aim was to better understand the dense, cross-species fabric that a garden is—and, in doing so, to improve humans’ ability to participate in that fabric in a more gentle and caring way.
The artists employed many different methods: insect stalking, plant and gardener croquis, vertical dream exercises, a wildlife camera, letter-writing to more-than-human inhabitants, and they hosted creative workshops in the garden. Here, they were assisted by a local 5th-grade class, as well as the gardener and garden volunteers, in getting to know the garden better.
Contact the artists to buy a copy. A remix version of the essay can be read here: https://sixtyeight.dk/future/tense/havens-linjer.html (in Danish)