Moving GardensDates29, 30, 31 March 2005 ConvenerProfessor Ian Donaldson, Director, HRC A series of three linked international conferences about the art of the garden and its global transformations, jointly sponsored by: The Huntington Library, San Marino The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven The Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) University Botanic Garden, Cambridge University. Gardens create a comforting illusion of stability and rootedness, but are constantly subject to evolution and change. They vary conspicuously from season to season and more subtly over lengthy periods of time. And like the plants that make up their individual elements, gardens -- and ideas about gardens -- migrate; and in migrating, undergo numerous mutations, large and small. An oriental garden in a western setting will inevitably carry a different set of meanings from its counterpart in China or Japan. A European botanical garden re-created in the antipodes may serve as an eloquent image of imperial power, or colonial nostalgia. Representations of gardens, in books, prints, engravings, paintings, also migrate from country to country, as do artists and authors themselves. These movements of people and artefacts in turn affect the ways in which gardens are perceived, created, and imagined. These three linked conferences set out to examine the art of the garden in relation to such geographical and temporal movements. Each conference will pay particular attention to local issues, dilemmas, and resources. Each will be interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together plant scientists, garden historians and practitioners, social historians and art historians, literary scholars, artists, writers -- and others. First Conference‘Activity and Repose: Place, Memory, and Sociality in Chinese and Japanese Gardens’ 3-4 December 2004, California, Convener: Stephen H. West (University of California, Berkeley) With Robert C. Ritchie (Director of Research, The Huntington) and Charles G. Salas (Research and Education, Getty Research Institute) The first conference was held at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, on 3 and 4 December 2004 (first day at the Huntington, second day at the Getty). It focused particularly on the Ornamental Garden in China and Japan, with incidental reference to the Huntington’s own Japanese garden, and its Chinese garden, currently under construction; and to the Getty Research Institute’s current theme, Duration. Second Conference‘Desert Gardens: Waterless Lands and the Problems of Adaptation’ 29, 30, 31 March 2005 Conveners: Professor Ian Donaldson, Director, HRC and Dr Libby Robin, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU The second conference will be held at the Australian National University,
Canberra on 29, 30, and 31 March 2005, and form part of the HRC’s
theme for 2005, Cultural Landscapes. The conference will focus particularly
on the way in which traditional ideas about the role and function of
the garden have been modified (in Australia, California, and other settler
communities) in relation to local conditions, and especially to one
major problem: the absence of water. It will also look at Aboriginal
ways of regarding and managing the land. Third Conference Moving
Gardens, Conference Three The third conference will be held in Cambridge, England, in early July 2005, under the auspices of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) and the University Botanic Garden. The conference will focus on the ways in which scholars study and explain the impact that gardens in general, and Botanic Gardens in particular, can exercise over those who work and visit them. EnquiriesIf you require any further information, please contact:
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