I have the unique privilege of working as the groundskeeper of The Zen Garden. This job has afforded me the opportunity to become intimate with a deeply considered space. The Zen Garden is a giant artwork in itself - its medium in plant, rock, water, the animals that visit… It requires constant maintenance and is an ever-changing sculpture but the effect of the effort is an unquestionable sense of peace. The garden is an external reflection of the Zen state of mind. A Zen garden incorporates the natural landscape and alludes to the natural landscape. I have learned to view it as a microcosm of the natural world - where each element is a miniaturization of a Zen form, fable, or lesson; a rock becomes an island, a pond an ocean, a tree a crane… I thought it only natural that a space so naturally artistic should be the host to other artists. 

 

The themes of the show - abstraction, austerity, and mutability - are the foundations of the garden and, now also, the artworks that live temporarily within it. The selected works embody these Zen concepts: suggestive forms, and minimalisms…

 

The title of the show, Zen in the Rocks, comes from a book of the same name by François Berthier which directs us to the questions we face in confronting rocks and in receiving nature through highly abstracted patterns. I often find myself ending my days of work in the Zen garden sitting at the pagoda. As the sun is setting and the light on the garden softens and reveals more shadows of its landscapes, I sit. Tired from my day, I try and consider what it all meant. Here is an invitation to consider the space and the art within it. What does it mean, the art in the rocks?

 

 

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