Bill Henson on a lush inner city garden
Clive talks to artist Bill Henson, a lover of beauty in all its forms.
I don't think I have ever been to a more appealing inner city garden than that created by Bill Henson in Northcote.
This converted two storey warehouse is clothed in Boston Ivy, concealing gigantic studios for photography and partner Louise Hearman's painting.
Gigantic doors open out into a garden of lushness and shade from the planting of Palms, Ferns, Camellias, Clivias and Cycads. Despite being only 11 years young, the garden already has an aged presence with terraces of plants that remain in pots, including a gigantic Canary Island Pine nearly 8 metres tall.
The atmosphere within the garden is dry, more reminiscent of an Italian villa as opposed to the lushness of a humid subtropical garden. Above the studio is Bill's awe-inspiring library with thousands of beautifully bound antiquarian titles covering history, art, landscaping and gardening. Bill has an acute intelligence and a prodigious memory, the essentials of all polymaths!
Trees are another particular interest as we find we are both reading Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Secret Life of Trees. It is his great love of trees that opens the subject of why current Australians don't value them.
We talked about identity and how it could be that we culturally ‘new’ Australians allowed Tasmania's biggest company to turn our most precious old growth rainforests, our future inheritance for all Australians, into wood chips for cardboard boxes for a pittance.*
“Home is at the heart of real and ours is culturally thin like our topsoil. Culture is never outside nature,” explains Bill. Australia's cultural inferiority complex, called the ‘cultural cringe’, affects every aspect of life from the arts to gardening.
“When the Japanese were developing their car industry in the 1960s and they thought about Australia, they realised all they had to do was label their product ‘fully imported’ in other words ‘much better than anything you [Australians] could make yourselves.’ Now of course, we see this cultural cringe deepening and accelerating with our needy anxiety and its German kitchen appliances, Italian marble bench tops and upload speeds a tenth of download speeds,” says Bill.
Bill's love of plants and gardening came from his mother who created a garden that taught him to understand the sensuality of nature by its seasons, its smell and its changing weather and light. Photography is his artistic expression of his “sense of beauty, inspired by love which is the foundation of all great art and great gardens. The universe works on attraction, from two molecules in a vacuum all the way up to an episode of Hollywood Housewives.
*The culturally ‘mature’ Japanese, on a tiny island with 10 times the population, have preserved 66% of their forests over thousands of years whilst we have lost 50% of our forests in 150 years!
Footnote:
• Louise Hearman won the 2016 Archibald prize for a painting of Barry Humphries and in 2014 won the Moran portrait prize for a painting of Bill.
• Bill Henson has exhibited at the National Gallery, the Venice Biennale and New York's Guggenheim. Duality is a recurring theme often in combination with adolescent subjects.
