There are as many kinds of gardens as there are gardeners. From simple gardens to elaborate ones. From native to exotic. From good to bad gardens. For Emma Hendrix, a garden is all about preservation, and that’s why on All Pressed Gardens they got their hands dirty in a very unique (and time-consuming) manner.
To interrogate this idea of preservation, an idea not too distant from that of attaining eternal life (perhaps to invite the mythological Eden to re-germinate), Emma went about creating two very different kinds of gardens, and the music of All Pressed Gardens, which they describe as “stack[ed] layers of sonic detritus, field recordings and electonic[s]”, follows both the creation and destruction of these gardens, which are, in their formation and disintegration, mirrors of each other. You’ll see what I mean. Keep troweling.
Gardens are birthed and gardens die. This is natural and by no means news. But what if an entire garden could be preserved, not in situ, but rather ex situ.
This is what Emma did. They began to press each and every flower — every weed, every sapling and shoot, every blade of grass, everything. They picked the plant, ensuring that as much of its roots and rhizomes and whatnot were present, and systematically pressed them in hundreds of plant presses (some quite large, as one can imagine), placing them between the cardboard sheets, between newspaper pages, pulling the belt straps tight. And the plants within would die and dry and thusly be preserved, as if the plants were embalmed with air. This process, it need not be said, took a tremendous amount of time.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
