Squaring the Circle 2002, maps (envelopes, board,
perspex, wood), audio equipment, 6 part looped soundtrack, birdboxes.
St Mary’s Churchyard, Museum of Garden History, London.
This sound installation, commissioned by Danielle Arnaud, consisted
of two maps of the knots garden and a soundtrack engineered by Andy
Ramsay (Stereolab).
The maps mirrored the configuration of the knot garden and referenced
the origins of the plants contained within it, thus illustrating a re-configured
geo-political/botanical view of the world. They also referred to Buddhist
mandalas in representing a tangible and intangible reality, i.e. the
plants and garden on one hand and the sounds on the other. The soundtrack
consisted of an amalgam of both the familiar and the exotic: tropical
rain, recordings from the BBC world service, the market place, signals
from the shipping lanes, animal mating calls, musical fragments…
It added a sense of surprise to the visitors of the garden and museum,
which was hoped would come close to that experienced by a 17th century
audience when first encountering the botanical novelties brought back
by explorer and gardener John Tradescent and his son.