Art 4f

Sculpture gardens and art parks

Sculpture gardens and art parks have a longer history than environmental or ecological art. Their development is essentially a post-war phenomenon in Europe and the USA. Britain played an initiating role. A wish to site sculpture in the landscape can be traced back to the 1930s and the work of Moore and Hepworth. Moore is generally accredited with being the man who put holes in modern sculpture. He states that punching holes through sculpture was a result of a consciousness of an object placed in space, a way of relating objects both to each other and their setting. This was 'the invasion of art by space, which in turn led to the invasion of its spatial surroundings by art' (Biggs1984: 17). Moore and Hepworth were members of Unit One a group of modernist painters, sculptors and designers who during the 1930s were concerned to develop a new sense of landscape and environment. Megaliths, park benches, raw materials all became accepted as 'sculptural' forms: 'sculpture is more primitive...than paintings; it is more solidly bound to earth...Its materials, stone and wood, existed before man and existed as sculpture' (Woods 1936, cited in Biggs 1984: 20). With such a sculptural landscape in mind Moore, Hepworth and others took their work out of the gallery and sited it in nature and subsequently the popularity of outdoor sculpture parks has increased tremendously. Some remain little more than galleries without walls. In other cases such as the Grizedale forest sculptures (Davies and Knipe 1984), the Dorset New Milestones project (Morland 1988), Kerguehennic in Brittany and Tikkon in Denmark the relationship of the sculptural forms to place and space is a fundamental part of their meaning. We explore this process of taking art out of the museum and gallery and the development of art as an active process of engagement in the landscape in more detail below.