Heide Museum of Modern Art

Demeter's garden

Lauren Berkowitz

3 March - 24 June 2007

Venue: Heide II

Demeter’s garden (2006) is the culmination of Lauren Berkowitz’s sustained interest in Heide and its abundant garden setting. Demeter’s garden evolved from Berkowitz’s homage to pre-colonial horticulture, Karakarook’s garden (2005–06), a permanent living outdoor sculpture located near Heide I, which involved intensive research into the indigenous plants of the Heidelberg region. A reminder of how the Heide landscape has changed – from open forest to cleared farm land to cultivated property – essentially Karakarook’s garden symbolically recognises how Aboriginal inhabitants tended to and were sustained by the land and its plant life. Specifically this garden acknowledges the Wurrundjeri clan of the Woiwurrung language group, in whose mythology the figure of Karakarook imparted to the women her knowledge of plants, including their medicinal and healing qualities. Karakarook’s garden contrasts with John and Sunday Reed’s European-style Kitchen Garden, and its geometric design creates an association with the Reeds’ cultivation of Australian modern art.

In Demeter’s garden, Berkowitz employs a botanical palette of material that she collected while planting and nurturing Karakarook’s garden. Its delightful composition of surprisingly colourful flowers, leaves and seedpods references the painting of David Aspden and Australian lyrical abstraction from the 1960s (the era in which the Reeds commissioned and took up residence in Heide II). This work also brims with wider references, from the historical symbolism and mythology related to plants, the legacy of botanical collection and display, art of the past, and concerns regarding the adaptability and fragility of the natural environment. For Berkowitz, flowers have a particular legacy at Heide, evoking Sunday Reed’s affinity with flora, which is characterised in images dedicated to Sunday by artists including Moya Dyring, Sidney Nolan and Mirka Mora.

Berkowitz’s title refers to the figure of Demeter, whose role in classical mythology was defined by symbolic allusions to the cycles of growth, decay and renewal. Today we think of these seasonal changes being precipitated as much by human intervention as the patterns of nature. Suggesting a range of relationships between the environment and its human inhabitants, both Demeter’s garden and Karakarook’s garden, sensitively activate history while acknowledging the importance of caring for the regeneration of our natural world.