MICHAEL EDWARDS

Michael Edwards at 300m3 Gallery

In his garden installation Michael Edwards captures and enhances micro sounds of growing plant roots. Why depict nature when you can create your own? Like a biochemical Frankenstein, Edwards has sewn together /created/ a monstrous garden body from disparate technical and organic elements and put them in a coffin like glass box. The threatening part is the horrendous noise that these little plants eventually can make. The work projects a sharp critique towards old colonial plantations, the Enlightenment’s individualistic gardening and our time’s genetically manipulated greens—but doesn’t fully disconnect itself from the heritage it’s trying to criticize. Nature caught in culture, or culture caught in nature? The dichotomies remain.

Sinziana Ravini, Art Critic and Journalist
December 2006.