Exhibitors
SHOW GARDENS | WATER GARDENS | SMALL GARDENS | CONCEPTUAL GARDENS
INSPIRING SPACES | WINDOWBOXES & HANGING BASKETS
PLANTS | GROWING & SHOWING MARQUEE | MARKET PLACE
Conceptual gardens
Rik Godfrey
After Malevich - A Garden of Non-Objectivity
Designer: Rik Godfrey
Contractor: Rik Godfrey
Click on the image to view a hi-res version
This garden challenges our objectification of plants rather than their subliminal effect on our emotions. The design is rooted in the Russian artist Malevich’s Supremacist ethos that 'the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling'.
This exhibit attempts to reduce the garden to a series of intangibles; colour, reflection, movement, light and shadow. Active viewing of The Garden of Non-Objectivity leaves you with a resultant feeling of mesmeric calm. The side and rear fabric boundaries are both practical, stopping un-intended views into the site, and aesthetic, literally creating a canvas on which light and shadow can play.
Through reflection the five stainless steel screens play with the onlooker’s perception of the planting creating an illusion of distortion and space. The ‘box’ enclosing the planting hides herbaceous form causing what remains of the grass appears to float over an ongoing bed of gravel.
Five satin finished stainless steel poles rise to the east and south of the exhibit casting slender shadows that suggest the passing of time. Soft wood posts and planks come from a sustainable source. A gravel surround hugs the stainless steel box, which seems to disappear as the reflected stone extends into it.
In keeping with the themes of the garden the planting is used in such a way that it is the effect achieved rather than the plant itself that is of importance. Plants are finely textured with either a stable single colour or a general ‘wash’ of many colours that have little individual dominance.
Entering his eighteenth year of a career in record retail management working for Virgin Megastores and Our Price Records, Rik Godfrey had a Eureka moment while pottering around in the garden on his day off. He decided to harness his creative streak and work with plants so he enrolled at Hadlow College in Kent. This led to a first-class BA (Hons) degree in Garden Design, graduating in 2005. Stepping straight into a position with the Trevor Tooth Garden Practice, Rik designed gardens and assisted Trevor in two award-winning Hampton Court Palace Flower Show gardens in 2005/2006. Rik left the security of the practice at the end of 2006, wanting to establish his own name as a designer, and launched Flint Design.