The Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden is a realm of many layers. An unplanned and organically evolving artist-created domain, it contains not only physical sculptures and landscaping, but a symbolic journey and visual dialogue that examines contrasts and parallels, between humans and nature, and human nature.
It explores in three-dimensional textural form the dichotomies of life and the complexities of the human psyche. The wild and the tame, the animalistic and human, serenity and turmoil. The garden itself is a symbol for this complexity - beautiful, but also home to nature's cycles of death, decay and destruction.
Located between "two worlds", one wild and one tamed, the garden borders the manicured suburbs of Stellenbosch and a rugged mountain wilderness where leopards still roam.
In this garden of private myth, the artist explores the Jungian notion of "the wilderness within".
He tells us more:
How does the process of the garden relate to your sculpture practice?
The garden is essentially a monumental sculpture in bass relief. I'd never worked on such a large scale before, but I found through the process of shaping the garden that the principles of the practice remained largely the same.
In some ways I felt like I was walking through a large surface of one of my sculptures. The garden became a dialogue - where the landscaping informed the placement of particular works, while the nature of my sculpture practice informed the shaping of the earth itself.
Symbolically, it embodies themes that run through my work - the counterpoint between tameness and wildness, where the mountain amphitheatre represents the untamed and the garden is an ordered, man-made entity.
Exploring this tension allowed me to place the sculptures in the context within which they were created - as forms of nature.
How do you see the garden evolving?
One way is obviously the foliage landscape - as plants die and grow, shapes will evolve naturally. As my work evolves, the sculptures placed in the garden and their stories will change. I also see it as a space for collaborative events - music, dance.
A third of the garden is dedicated to showing other artists' work - the biggest collection we've had in this space so far has been by Louis Olivier. The intention is that creative installations of various forms evolve and change over time.
How does collaboration factor in to your practice?
I'm fairly reclusive and inwardly focused, so collaboration hasn't historically been a big part of my creative process. That said, I've collaborated in the past, on design, and exhibitions, and I'm open to it - the garden poses many possibilities.
One really successful partnership I worked on was Untamed - also within a garden, at Kirstenbosch - with architect Enrico Daffonchio and writer Ian McCallum.
The installation, set against the natural backdrop of the garden, symbolised the internal psychological conflict between our rational mind and our repressed wildness - where the building's living wall and rusted metal walls invited reflection on the conflict between the man-made landscape and the natural landscape.
This pavilion is now positioned in the heart of the sculpture garden.
Right now, I'm exploring a film collaboration with contemporary documentary maker Simon Wood that delves into my new work.
There's new work in the garden?
The garden is my primary work, which is constantly transforming along with the sculptures contained within it. The new work is quite a jump for many who know my earliest pieces.
In a nutshell, I grew up in conservative religious milieu until my mid 30s. Feelings, emotions, sexuality, violence, power were all taboo, not discussed. The animals of my early work became the channel through which I could express these concepts. Big cats inherently embody all of these things.
As I left that thought system - a 15-year process - I started to integrate those more difficult aspects into my work, and the pieces transformed into shamanic half-animal, half-female forms, but isolated. This new work represents a process of integration - where I'm having, in an increasingly honest way, to integrate painful, complex and nuanced emotion through a merging of male and female figures.
Which sculpture sums up the garden?
One of the most archetypal images in the garden is the bent-over male figure in front of the mountain. It reflects the mountain in its form and texture, but also evokes something of the metaphorical meaning of the mountain as a wild space. So, it speaks on a literal and psychological level.
Other artist's gardens you admire?
There are a number of international artists who've made extraordinary gardens, including Monet, Niki de Saint Phalle and Ian Hamilton Finlay. But it's the wilderness, nature's garden that's my primary inspiration. I have a preference for arid, desert landscapes. I find these landscapes reveal the forms of the land more clearly. And there's less noise. Places like the Richtersveld, the Northern Cape and the Karoo.
• Visits to the Dylan Lewis Studio and Sculpture Garden are by appointment only. Book on dylanlewis.com, call 021-880-0054 or e-mail reservations@dylanart.co.za
