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Potted slant on urban jungles

Three artists are drawing on pot plants to tell a story about city living. Leesha McKenny looks at their project reports the Sydney Morning Herald of July 9, 2008.

To the keen observer, Sydney's inner suburbs are filled with potted histories of weedy characters and flourishing romances that have shaped them and those who live within them.

Now three artists, Tessa Rapaport, Karl Logge and Diego Bonetto, have set out to collect the living stories of Redfern through some of its reclusive and most unassuming residents: its pot plants.

"People are very forthcoming," Bonetto says. "You know: 'This [was] given to me from my ex-husband when we were getting divorced, it's a happy plant. We divorced, but I still have the happy plant."'

The Hanging Gardens, a living installation set up inside the usually not-so-verdant foyer of CarriageWorks for this week's Underbelly emerging arts festival, examines the premise that plants are part of any community - and a way that people form relationships with each other as well as their environment.

"It's like going to the park with your dog and you have all of these dog friends that you just know by the name of their pets," Bonetto says. "Garden relationships are very similar: 'Ah, you know that lady who owns that bougainvillea along the fence …' "

Residents have been invited to lend their beloved botanicals to the trio for the project, which culminates at the two-day festival this weekend, providing them with care instructions and a letter of introduction that will be displayed alongside each pot plant during their stay at CarriageWorks.

The installation has already collected dozens of plants from across the inner west. Together it is hoped they will form a green picture of how the area and its residents have grown over time. "They never seem to die," says a handwritten card attached to a small pot. "I'm 83 years old and I've lost much agility that is required to look after a garden. Therefore these evergreen succulents provide me with much pleasure and will do so in the years that I have ahead of me."

Bonetto says many people form special relationships with plants, using them as a marker to an important time in their lives. One of the installation's frangipanis was planted by a mother when she was five months' pregnant, for example, while another of the plants, a lopsided cactus, turned up at a children's birthday party one year and never left.

Logge says that potted plants are a way of keeping a connection to the natural, even in the most urban of environments. "In the inner city the pot plant is one bit of nature you can hang onto," he says.

It's also contrary reality to the Aussie ideal of a big backyard for communities in drought-prone cities, where a sunny stretch of lawn, outside the confines of a park, is a rare luxury.

Rapaport and Logge, who teach sustainable design, say they want people to acknowledge green spaces already present in urban ones; a green movement that everyone can already participate in.

"We can try to make our buildings as green as possible and try to do all these things, but we're still working with the urban environment," Logge says. "This kind of project is about trying to place the natural in direct confrontation with the industrial and the urban. And that's what people have responded to quite nicely."

Which, if all goes to plan, will lead to a complete green invasion of the concrete, steel and glass of CarriageWorks by this weekend.

"When you take all these little pot plants, standing them next to each together, they form this green mass," Logge says. "So en masse, pot plants become a kind of jungle in a way."

In fact, two of the biggest additions to the installation were among the first to arrive at CarriageWorks. A rubber plant and a ficus have been at the site for about 10 years - putting down roots well before the venue was turned into an arts centre last year.

"These plants have stood sentinel; they watched it all change," Logge says. "To me it also points to a fact - it might be sooner rather than later - when this place is not full of people plants will still be around, pushing up through the cracks."

Photo: Fiona Morris - The Hanging Gardens … Diego Bonetto, left, Tessa Rapaport and Karl Logge erect their artwork at the CarriageWorks.

Source: www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/07/08/1215282835469.html?feed=fairfaxdigitalxml