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• 1 2018-08-11T19:25:12+00:00 Micro-Cosmosis 17 plain 2018-09-08T18:19:09+00:00 Rocks and gardens serve as microcosms for larger natural forces and formations.  In classical Chinese gardens, taihu rocks, individually situated or piled into rockeries, were designed to evoke mountains. An oft-quoted passage from 18th century writer Shen Fu states that “in piling up rocks into mountains…the aim is to see the small in the large, and the large in the small, to see the real in the illusory and to see the illusory in the real.”  The famous rockery at the Lion Forest Garden in Suzhou seen here features caves and tunnels under tall standing stones, simulating the vast caverns and striking peaks in renowned mountains like the Five Sacred Peaks.
  
  Pierre Jardin terms this scaling effect micro-cosmosis: a seed microcosm sprouting a cosmos, absorbing the viewer by osmosis into a landscape where the large appears in the small, the real in the illusory. 
  
  
  Penjing (Chinese, 'pot' and 'landscape') and its later adaptation Bonsai (Japanese, 'pot' or 'tray' and 'plant' or 'tree') exemplify this effect par excellence. Jardin coined the term to give a name to a striking experience in the Lingering Garden in Suzhou, when he saw self-similar landscapes at different scales in a side garden.
  
  Despite his lack of skill in these subtle garden arts, Pierre Jardin attempts to evoke larger landscapes in small-scale assemblages, in an idiom suited to the geographical and geological context of his garden, coastal Southern California. This installation uses porous shore stones to stage a tidal shelf dotted with beachcombed rocks, seaweed, and coral meant to resemble birds, eggs, and small treasures one might find in tidal pools. A confusion of scale results from a jumble of juxtaposed elements: a dolphin skull dwarfs rocks standing in for coastal rock outcroppings, while small coral pieces in shells resemble trees in a larger landscape. 
  
  Behind the Tidal Shelf installation, three large, upright-balanced rocks loom.  Pierre Jardin named them “The Holey Trinity” and imagines them as a set of tall coastal formations like one sees along beaches all  around the world, from the Twelve Apostles in Australia to the Stone Henge pillars of Montaña de Oro State Park near San Luis Obispo.
  

   

   

   

   

• 1 2019-01-13T19:33:26+00:00 Rocks and Water, Large and Small 2 plain 2019-01-13T19:34:01+00:00 Chinese gardens are cosmological landscapes designed to express ‘the entire universe with its ‘ten thousand things,’ and make this profusion intelligible” (Jencks 1978, 196). The Chinese word for landscape, ‘shan shui,’ literally means mountains and water, and evokes the Isles of the Immortals. It suggests balanced oppositions between yang and yin, masculine strength and feminine moisture, material and mental stolidity versus yielding and following the path of least resistance, rough and smooth textures, stillness and motion (streams), silence and sound (waterfalls).
  Rocks, individually situated or piled into rockeries, evoke mountains. Scaling, producing nature in miniature, is an important design principle in Chinese gardens. In an oft-cited 18th century treatise by Shen Fu, he writes that “in piling up rocks into mountains…the aim is to see the small in the large, to see the large in the small, to see the real in the illusory and the to see the illusory in the real” (in Jencks 1978, 196). Rocks and rockeries were more than visual evocations of mountains: as Parkes writes, “rocks are thought to partake of the powers of the mountain less through their resembling its outward appearance than for their being true microcosms, animated by the same energies that formed the heights and peaks.”