AROUND ABOUT
‘Around About’ was one of the winning entries in the 2015 edition of the International Garden Festival at the Jardin de Metis, Quebec, Canada.
AROUND-ABOUT is a ‘dry Landscape’ installation inspired from the concept of Japanese Zen gardens. A set or large roundabouts is to be placed inside a field of gravel. These roundabouts, whose design is inspired from agricultural machinery, include tines bellow their bottom beam which rakes the gravel in circular patterns as the roundabout spins.
The visitors are active participants in the composition of the garden and its constant rearrangement. In contrast to the typical Zen garden, which is usually planned to be seen from the outside of the garden, AROUND-ABOUT is seen, created and experienced from the inside, through a joyful and playful activity.
The proposal acts on the tension between order and disorder. The entire garden works in harmony, as a mechanism whose components are in precise proportion and relation to one another. As visitors walk away from the roundabouts, their footsteps violate the orderly pattern of the gravel. Once they get back on the roundabouts and spin them, the garden returns to order.
