Angus Henderson
Doubling Back(s); to the City/Garden
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Project description
In the National Museum of Scotland, a travelling service sits in front of an oak-panelled wall. Nearby, nestled in a cabinet in the Royal Botanic Gardens, a seed of the lodoicea maldivica, the ‘coco-de-mer’, slowly shrinks and shrivels. All three objects have been on journeys, and tell complex stories. The travelling service belonged to Pauline Bonaparte-Borghese, Napoleon’s sister, and was willed upon her death to her ‘friend’, Alexander 10th Duke of Hamilton. The panelling was salvaged from the Drawing Room of Hamilton Palace prior to its demolition, sold and transported to New York, returning to Scotland to be put on display in 1992. The seed, named for the Maldives but native to the Seychelles, was believed to be the Biblical forbidden fruit, or perhaps produced by a giant underwater tree. All three objects exemplify a strangeness, a sense of being in-place and yet out-of-place furthered by an exoticisation engendered by the curation of gaze. Doubling Back(s) establishes a dialogue between these objects. It excavates and develops a thickened edge to the Botanic Garden — between the back of the Gardens and the back gardens of the city — as a site of exchange. Two hybrid programmes overlap one another, one concerned with the production of specific soils, one concerned with the valuation, documentation and exchange of objects. An oyster bar, coffee shop, restoration workshop and fire generate rich waste, supporting the production of acidic and alkaline soils. A wall for hanging walls, a drum of busts and a garden of ephemera hold and enable the viewing of strange objects. Things are seen closely by the macro-photographer, sampled by the edaphologist and forgotten in the grotto. In this thickened edge, the picturesque views established by the wandering paths of the Botanics, the perspectival axes of Hamilton Palace, the macro-photography of a cataloguer, and the aerial images analysed by an edaphologist collapse onto one another, establishing a new way of seeing and perceiving objects and landscapes.
This project was completed in collaboration with Daniel Anderson, MArch 1.
Doubling Back(s) | Site Model; Plaster, Mahogany, Ash, Oak, Brass, Card, Graphite
Doubling Back(s) | Site Plan
Approach
The project began with investigations into exotic objects, oriented around an understanding of the exotic as a separation of the object and the viewer. The exotic objects that emerged for this study were the dissected seed of the lodoicea maldivica in the Herbarium collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and the travelling service which formerly belonged to Pauline Bonaparte-Borghese and Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton and which is now housed in the National Museum of Scotland. Both objects shared a number of thematic familiarities; both had travelled extensively before coming to be in Scotland, and these travels imbued each with associative memories and tangential narratives within their stories. Both performed a function of holding and encasement, and were designed, to hold particular pieces with great care and specificity. These two objects suggested two sites – the Botanics and the estate of Hamilton. These were unravelled and the complexities of the relationships between objects, collections and landscapes were explored. The sites were then gathered back up into a series of doubles; models holding these complexities at varying scales which were used to enact a relational exchange which was established between the sites.
Pauline | Pauline | Constructing Body Measures (1:1, Steel, mahogany, brass, ash, linen, wax, resin)
Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh | Lodoicea maldivica
Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh | Doubling Back(s) Entrance
Pauline | Venus Victrix (After Canova)
Nécessaire de Voyage | Pauline Borghese-Bonaparte's Travelling Service
Hamilton | Study on a Reclaimed Isthmus
Doubling Back(s) | Contorted Landscape of Coalesced Visions
Rendering | Upper Floor Plan, Screen Isometric, Macro Study Section
Rendering | Lower Floor Plan, Pauline, South Gathering Space Section
Programmatic Axonometric and Location Plan
Macro Photographer's Study | Model Photos
Macro Photographer's Study | Model (1:100, Plaster, Mahogany, Glass, Clay, Walnut, Beech, Brass, Steel)
Macro Photographer's Study | Model (1:100, Plaster, Mahogany, Glass, Clay, Walnut, Beech, Brass, Steel)
Macro Photographer's Study | Model (1:100, Plaster, Mahogany, Glass, Clay, Walnut, Beech, Brass, Steel)
Macro Photographer's Study | Model (1:100, Plaster, Mahogany, Glass, Clay, Walnut, Beech, Brass, Steel)
Macro Photographer's Study | Section, Ink Drawing over model (1:50)
Doubling Back(s) | Recordings
Recording | Filled House
Recording | Emptied House
Recording | Macro Photographer's Study
Recording | South Gathering Space
Recording | North Gathering Space
Recording | Oyster Bar
Recording | Herbarium
Recording | Firepit and Herbarium
An isthmus Virtine | Collecting Hamiltonian and Botanical Landscapes
South Gathering Space | Model (1:100, plaster, mahogany, card, brass, paper, clay)
Pauline | Constructing Body Measures (1:1, Steel, mahogany, brass, ash, linen, wax, resin)
Doubling Back(s) | Site Model; Plaster, Mahogany, Ash, Oak, Brass, Card, Graphite
Macro Photographer's Study | Model (1:100, Plaster, Mahogany, Glass, Clay, Walnut, Beech, Brass, Steel)
Doubling Back(s)
Where Janus is a well-trodden architectural motif, a figure with two backs as opposed to two faces is not found in the cultural canon. Possibly the closest we have is the beast with two back of Othello, a reference not necessarily out of place among the strange objects and characters gathered into the project thus far. The project takes the form of a double back to the city/garden. On the one hand it is the back of the city, the car boot for the exchange of unvalued objects, on the other the compost heap and storage are of the botanics. Doubling back enjoys the backs of things, the scraped retained surface, the back elevations and gardens of the villas of Inverleith Row, the storage of lights over the summer, the bins.
A chain-mail screen delineated the boundary of the project; a perforated double back hung on a tilting frame. The frame uses the screen as a counterweight, as it also holds the heavy walls skirting the garden side of the proposal, whilst also holding black pipes which use solar energy to heat the water running through them to be used to heat the pool case .
Doubling Back(s) | Site Model; Plaster, Mahogany, Ash, Oak, Brass, Card, Graphite
Angus Henderson
Doubling Back(s); to the City/Garden
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