Artists Garden: Proposal for VA[A]DS, Free University of Tbilisi
The Artist Garden Studio is a site-based, pedagogical project that brings together artistic practice, plant cultivation, and material transformation through an evolving, time-based framework.
The interest in developing this work in Tbilisi builds on an earlier site visit in 2018, which initiated an ongoing engagement with the region’s landscape, plant ecologies, and material traditions. The project emerges from that experience, as a way of returning to and working within those conditions through a collaborative and process-oriented structure.
The proposal is grounded in the history of natural dyes used in Georgian and Caucasian carpet-making, where color followed the sequence plant → dye → thread → carpet. The Artist Garden carries this logic forward, rearticulating it as:
plant → pigment → material → artwork.
This is not a departure from tradition, but an extension from the production of a fixed object toward a more open engagement with material processes, temporality, and site. Pigment becomes a medium that can move across drawing, painting, paper, and installation, while remaining rooted in ecological and seasonal cycles.
The garden itslef a subject for work in plain air.
Developed in collaboration with VA[A]DS, the project would engage a small group of students (approximately 15–25), allowing for close, studio-like interaction while also opening into broader participation through workshops and shared activities. The campus itself, open and transitional spaces, offers a compelling context in which to situate a distributed, living work.
The structure is intentionally light and responsive:
Fall (2–3 weeks): introduction, planting, and initial workshops
Winter: observation, research, and continuity supported locally
Spring (2–3 weeks): pigment work, material development, and presentation thrugh public exhibitions.
Between visits, a student coordinator or teaching assistant would help maintain continuity, allowing the project to remain active.
The Artist Garden is conceived as an ongoing, gentle system, one that unfolds over time, accommodates variation, and resists rigid outcomes. It functions simultaneously as a site of making, a pedagogical framework, and a form of shared attention. Each iteration builds on the previous one, allowing the work to remain open, cumulative, and responsive to those who engage.
The project aligns with the ethos of VA[A]DS: An artistic practice situated within broader cultural, material, and ecological contexts, while maintaining a strong emphasis on experimentation, process, and critical engagement.
THE ARTIST NATURE RELATIONSHIP
THE ARTISTS GARDEN STUDIO