Overview

Gardens provoke thought and engagement in ways that are often overlooked. This book shines new light on long-held assumptions about gardens and proposes novel ways in which we might reconsider them. The author challenges traditional views of how we experience gardens, how we might think of gardens as works of art, and how the everyday materials of gardens – plants, light, water, earth – may become artful. The author provides a detailed analysis of Tupare, a garden in New Zealand, and uses it as source material for his analysis of the philosophical issues art gardens raise. His new account of gardens highlights the polymodal, multi-sensual, and improvisatory character of the garden experience, it offers an ontological comparison between gardens and humans and other animals, and it explains how identical plants, and arrangements of plants, may be mundane when encountered beyond the garden but artful, meaningful, and aesthetically valuable when experienced within it.

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9781789971415

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Reviews

Powell's stimulating and rigorously argued book offers new insights into the ways in which we experience and understand gardens, how we conceptualise their ontology, and how we appreciate their temporality and material beauty. A timely and highly engaging account that reintroduces gardens' distinctive qualities, features, processes, aesthetic possibilities, and arthood as sites of joy and celebration. (Professor Samer Akkach, Founding Director, CAMEA, University of Adelaide) Dancing with Time offers a novel account of gardens that returns them to a prized position in the artworld. Highlighting their distinctive, four-dimensional nature, this important work explains how temporality enriches our experience of gardens. The rich examination of gardens' status as art will delight aestheticians, landscape design theorists, and garden lovers alike. (Professor Sondra Bacharach, Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington) A welcome addition to the growing interest in philosophical writing about gardens. ... Powell's search for answers as to whether or not gardens can (again) be an art form and the nature of their ontological status is careful and exacting ... (Isis Brook, British Journal of Aesthetics , 2019)

Powell's stimulating and rigorously argued book offers new insights into the ways in which we experience and understand gardens, how we conceptualise their ontology, and how we appreciate their temporality and material beauty. A timely and highly engaging account that reintroduces gardens' distinctive qualities, features, processes, aesthetic possibilities, and arthood as sites of joy and celebration. (Professor Samer Akkach, Founding Director, CAMEA, University of Adelaide) Dancing with Time offers a novel account of gardens that returns them to a prized position in the artworld. Highlighting their distinctive, four-dimensional nature, this important work explains how temporality enriches our experience of gardens. The rich examination of gardens' status as art will delight aestheticians, landscape design theorists, and garden lovers alike. (Professor Sondra Bacharach, Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington)

Author Information

John Powell lives in New Plymouth, New Zealand and is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

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