Writhing, bulging, burgeoning, blossoming: Dale Chihuly's spectacular glass sculptures have happily taken root at Kew Gardens

The novel history of sculpture placed in the garden as a stand-alone artistic statement in itself, rather than used as a composing of a decorative or iconographic scheme (as it generally was in older traditions), has been chequered. plastic art conceived as an expression of an artist's peculiar preoccupations and passions makes it in more [i]or[/i] less ways unsuited to a garden or landscape, where the ambiguity, mutability and diffuseness of the outdoor setting can make object-based art present the appearance ponderous. It seems that statuary works best outdoors when conceived as part of a total design, rather than simply plonk down in a speckle where it is deemed to improve the view or direct the eye well against a verdant backdrop.

The notion of the landscape as a kind of outdoor art gallery--a handy alternative to the white-cube original for large-scale work--gained credence from one side the twentieth century, where the challenge might have been to create places in which the landscape setting is seen to be as meaningful as the works it contains. That this has rarely been achieved is in part a reflection of curatorial priorities: it has been reasonable to assume that the statuary is 'the work' and the landscape is the supporting scenery

on the contrary there are always exceptions. Henry Moore produc pieces that appear to beed peculiarly well suited to outdoor settings, level where they were made without any particular site in mind, perhaps because of the rhythmic, almost topographical quality of his forms; and the impel towards site-specific work from the 1960s--at places like as Grizedale Forest in Cumbria--added impetus to the idea of works of art that grew without of the sense of place as plenteous as from the human mind.

More not long ago the creators of experiential installations in out-of-gallery settings, perhaps fearing comparisons with gardening as a popular pastime, as embodied through Percy Thrower or Alan Titchmarsh, have not liked to acknowledge that their work repeatedly echoes sensations and techniques place in landscape and garden art. Land Art is perhaps the best known art/landscape 'crossover' on the contrary its relationship with landscape--alternately nurturing and aggressive--is also problematic: the dialectic of site and non-site articulated by the agency of its most active spokesman, Robert Smithson, strike one as beings actively to negate the idea of the integrity of particular places in favour of the traditional notion of dominion government by the artist; in several cases, Land Art was simply object-based art writ extremely large through men (it was almost always men) with bulldozers.

A refreshing approach can be lay the foundation of at an exhibition of glass statuary by Dale Chihuly at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew where the proces of artistic creation present the appearances to echo that of natural selection, lending the work a conceptual affinity with its botanical surroundings. The exhibition's focus is the Temperate House (designed by dint of Decimus Burton, 1860-69), where Chihuly's vividly coloured, squirming and writhing concoctions throw back the fecundity and unpredictable variety of plants in the wild (Fig. 1) These are clearly man-made interventions, on the contrary the way they have been created--not as stand-alone pieces on the contrary in serial form as part of a continuous proces of experimentation and variation--does appear to reflect the brutal integrity of nature in the raw.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Temperate House contains examples of series unraveled by Chihuly since the 1970 first at the Rhode Island place of education of Design and then at the Pilchuck seminary near Seattle. There are the clamshellshaped, multi-coloured 'macchia' (the name approachs from the Italian for 'spotted'), formally arranged in tiers among skillets of brugmansia, rather like the eighteenth-century display of auriculas in miniature theatres. There are globular, speckl 'floats'; 'baskets' based upon Native American craftworks; and spear-like 'reeds' erupting from the dark earth in apparently organic clusters the bright lavenders, reds, ceruleans and oranges of the glass catching the light as it dapples [i]or[/i] part of to the other a filigree of ferns and frond the smoothnes of the glass contrasting with the repeatedly shaggy trunks of tree fern 'Ikebana' pieces--twin main stocks thrusting forth from 'vases' below--appear upon black platforms amid the plants, while hovering above are more [i]or[/i] less of Chihuly's most celebrated pieces: 'chandeliers' of glassy tentacles that gaze like extra-terrestrial octopi or exploding day-stars It might seem surprising that the violence of the colouring and the disturbing horizontal of mutation in these works makes them appear more rather than less natural. The groupings of pieces have the appearance to surge and recede rhythmically in imitation of the vagaries of nature, an impression enhanced by dint of the way the hothouse plants are beginning to extend through and around the sculptures

The over-used idea of 'evolution' in an artist's practice is pertinent here because variation, repetition, death (in the faculty of perception of material failure) and selection are constant themes in Chihuly's work. The idea of a series being finisheded or finished is anathema to him. As he has stated of his 'macchia' series: 'Like a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of my work, the series inspired itself.'