Call and Response: Landscape Interventions in Blake Garden

Not long after relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area I discovered Blake Garden, a landscape laboratory and public garden teaching facility in Kensington, California.  As a photographer, I had grown deeply interested in the episodic shifting of light and mood produced by the dense coastal fog peculiar to the region, and began to explore the shrouded garden paths through medium format and infrared cameras.  My walks led to unplanned encounters with enigmatic installations that invited contemplation, but did not immediately speak to a coherent narrative or purpose.  I would later learn that these “interventions” were part of Revealing the Landscape, a project of students in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning of the University of California, Berkeley.  The student’s work, which seemed to echo the paradoxical language of dreams, appealed to my fascination with incongruous intersections of nature and human activity.  The fog added poignancy to their delicacy and transience. On my return to Blake Garden after several weeks, I found the installations had been removed without a trace.