Gardening the Archive:
A Conversation between David Alesworth and Hammad Nasar

For a contemporary artist, David Alesworth (b. 1957) has an unusual relationship with the landscape. For more than twenty-five years, he has maintained parallel professional lives: as an artist and art teacher; and as a landscape designer and horticultural consultant. Returning to live and work in the UK in 2015, after more than three decades in Karachi and Lahore, his geographic, artistic, horticultural, and biographical entanglements are directly reflected in a heterogonous and wide-ranging body of work featured in the Paul Mellon Centre’s Landscape Now conference (2017). In our cover collaboration with Alesworth for this special issue of British Art Studies, we feature five details from his recent projects that suggest the range of different questions we may pose to landscapes, now.

HN:

The distressed collage-like image transfers of clipped trees in Global Forest (2018) reveal a channelled violence (Fig. 1), and directly reference Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s book of the same name that examines how trees chemically affect the environment. Are these distinct but similar trees icons of a dystopic landscape?

DA:

Those ritualistically mutilated trees and their distressed reproductions are intended to speak of our dysfunctional relationship with the non-human world. I see urban trees as a frontline in the perpetual battle of culture with nature: where some are coddled and others are brutalized. Kenneth Helphand’s text “Defiant Gardens”, which surveys gardens cultivated in brutal wartime conditions, comes to mind. With this holistic perspective, Kroeger also speaks of the “Global Garden” as containing not only all the world’s forests, but also the entire biosphere, humanity included. This idea is a useful concept for today, maybe offering a prescription for the ills of the Anthropocene, or as Kroeger might phrase it, a workable Bioplan—an idealistic programme for healing this damaged world. Though, as the Trump administration has conceded, it is already too late; we are soon to be cooked along with much else, unless some planetary-scaled geo-engineering enterprise re-sequesters much of that carbon we have so recently liberated.

The works of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and their perspectives informed by deep scientific expertise, are still very much among my influences. One of the first things I did on moving to the UK in 2015 was an extended walk on the Jurassic Coast in the company of Exeter University’s earth systems scientists, some of whom had been taught by Lovelock himself. It was a sobering experience.

HN:

The Hyde Park, Kashan 1862 (2011) is one among a series of textile works where you treat the classical gardens of Persian carpets as palimpsests through which to stage conversations across time and space (Fig. 2). You have spoken of these works as heterotopias—where ideas of perfection wrestle with the violence of transforming nature into garden. The forceful driving of large needles through the weft of the carpet is a violent process that easily lends itself to post-colonial readings of the imperial project. What guides your juxtapositions of carpet fragments and the maps they serve as ground for?

DA:

I consider the carpets I co-opt into these works to be cultural signifiers for the broad Islamic world and its ways of life. It was a late encounter with Foucault’s theory of the Heterotopia that directly led to the genesis of the carpet works. His tantalizingly brief mention of Oriental gardens as containing “seemingly superimposed meanings”, and of Oriental carpets as “reproductions of gardens”, came to me at a point when I was looking for ways to complicate and unpack notions of the garden between cultures and to see it as something other than leisure ground or amenity space.¹ In that respect, Lawrence Gardens, or Bagh-e-Jinnah as it is known today, in Lahore continues to be an enormously rich resource for my work (Fig. 3). Maps and tribal carpets have so much in common: the containment of a space both practical and symbolic; a certain density of information; and as indicators of world-views.

I consider all of my working trajectories to be derived directly from my lived experience, and it happens both consciously and sometimes unknowingly. There was a massive Kashan in my childhood. I am still unsure of the stories of its origins within the family. Nor do I know where it went subsequently. It possibly wasn’t any bigger than those I work upon now, and it was soft, worn, and muted—much as those I prefer to work with. Tribal rugs hold to core tenets and yet each is unique, much like a garden—with Eden, foundational to all the Abrahamic faiths, serving as the archetypal garden.

It was Alam the then head mali (gardener) at Lawrence Gardens (or Bagh-e-Jinnah) that set me to research the park’s origins. He told me its layout was based upon Kew Gardens in London. In some ways, this is so; I have never found plans for Lawrence Gardens in the Kew Gardens Archives, but I continue to research its history.

Maps and gardens are both parcels of landscape that may be read and are often whole worlds unto themselves. I tend to work with the antiquated plans of gardens rather than from the direct experience of them, though actually knowing those spaces is important to me. In these works, I hope to complicate the garden and reinstate it as a thinking, spiritual space; anything other than the ubiquitous amenity space gardens have become. In the studio, I think about working as an artist, as I might work as a gardener—it’s a vague enough thought to allow for all kinds of connections both ancient and new, and other emergent possibilities.

HN:

The yellow star-shaped pods which you dispersed along the famous Berlin street in Unter den Linden (2010) are freighted with meaning—of the globalization of plants and people; of symbols of nationhood, but also of alienation—indeed of the infamous yellow star that literally symbolized “otherness” for Germany’s Jews (Fig. 4). Is this yet another palimpsest? Do landscapes remember?

DA:

I like to think they do; that all are inscribed by the history and traces of the peoples that have lived in them in some psychogeographical way.

HN:

The Drawing in Time series (2018) of photographs plays with scale; the geographic scale of these land drawings where you used a bulldozer at a cement plant to prepare the limestone dusting for your drawings traced with a stick (Fig. 5). And the geological scale that transforms plant matter into coal—which is a layer revealed underneath the surface by your drawing stick (Fig. 6, Fig. 7, Fig. 8). What attracted you to treat the cement factory as a site from which to consider these questions of depth—in time and space?

DA:

The site of the Pioneer cement factory in Khushab, Pakistan is around 2,000 acres including the on-site quarries, mineral stores, and two kiln runs. Jetlag, no Internet, no cell coverage, and initially no on-site coordination drove me around the site twice daily for much of the first week. These works were brought about on seeing my footprints in the layers of limestone dust over coal, leaving a jet-black transitory inscription upon those mineral histories.

I had come to the residency at the Pioneer cement factory armed with certain ideas that quickly fell away once I had spent time at the site. In the end, the Drawing in Time works are actually connected to the textile forms I have been working with over the past decade—they both engage with kinds of crafting.

Craft has been an enduring aspect of my practice throughout the time I have spent in Pakistan, because craft in that context is political. It speaks of ways of making, thinking, and resisting that are before, or underneath, the colonial period. The arts of the Bazaar are largely uncontaminated by received notions of art or quality. The carpet works constitute a much higher form of craft practice than my earlier concerns with craft in popular culture and decorated transport in particular, but all share the communality of the horror vacui. The Manchester-based Zeigler and Co. were commissioned to address this irritant and to come up with an aesthetic more suited to European tastes. The legacy of which was the more muted and subdued Zeigler carpet that has now become the Chobi of today. Drawing in Time, with its gentle repetitions, “stitches” these histories, concerns, and thoughts together.

HN:

In the Gardens of England series, you collaborate with the Lahore-based miniature painter Shakila Haider, who transforms your photographs into vaguely otherworldly depictions of Bristol’s front yard shrubbery and trees (Fig. 9, Fig. 10, Fig. 11). Can we read this hybrid imagery as a reverse “Company School” body of work? 

HN:

Your work rarely depicts people, but its making is often collaborative. In earlier work—for instance, the collaborative project Arz-e-Mauood (Promised Lands) (1997), with Durriya Kazi—the work itself was an activation of a communal space in a public garden, which in a curious coincidence is also called Bagh-e-Jinnah, albeit in Karachi rather than Lahore (Fig. 13, Fig. 14, Fig. 15).² What are we to read into this apparent withdrawal of people from your more recent work?