VISIONARY INSTITUTE
MAGIC- Multispecies Art Garden Indigenous CompostAn ongoing project and practice
‘People will wonder how a garden can be art, but to me art is not so much product as it is process. Art is ‘growing from the know to the unknown. Art is taking responsibility for energy in an appropriate form’ Maryanne Caruthers-Akin
‘Any sufficiently developed technology is not distinguishable from magic.’- Sol LeVitt
‘Magic is mythopoetic, it sustains itself on the active creation of inhabitable myths’.
‘Land care is the main purpose of life.’- Bill Gammage
MAGIC is Land practice of Multispecies Visionary Institute and manifests as Voyniches Forest Garden by our home in Newcastle. The yield of this MAGIC, the surplus, its logic and my artistic relationship with it unfolds as ART with its unique language. This practice includes nurturing and exchange, reciprocal cultivation and care; cultivating by feeding and building the soil and the soul, a type of heartful gardening (drawing from organic and sustainable models of biodynamic, permaculture, forest gardening) and a way of becoming of the place- indigenous compost. This practice feeds MAGIC directly into ART. It is a metabolic and erotic interaction; practice of continuous curiosity, and experimentation, hands on care for the plants, land and the multiple critters. It is is about learning and employing a set of skills such as sowing, propagating, grafting, mulching or companion planting. Gardening and foraging are an ongoing exploration into the response and reciprocity of the given locality and involve making habitats for other species and cultivating multispecies alliances that nurture the earth and our bodies. It is an endeavour that, by its own nature, is about past, present, and future. It is MAGIC that generates ART.
Selection of pictures from the MAGIC of Multispecies Visionary Institute, Voynichese Forest Garden, always in seasonal flux, always in the making...