Square Shaped Garden - Venus & Copper

Square Shaped Garden - Venus & Copper belongs to a group of works called The Square Shaped Garden. Seven of these, including Square Shaped Garden - Venus & Copper, were exhibited at CFHILL, Stockholm (where they were strikingly arranged together as a group on the same wall) in conjunction with the release of Christine Ödlund’s book Growing the Third Ear Under the Great Astral Mother Tree in the spring of 2022. Under the heading ‘Square Shaped Garden’ Ulrika Pilo writes (in ‘Approaches’, article in Growing the Third Ear Under the Great Astral Mother Tree, 2022):

The history of geometry demonstrates that there is room for magic even within the most well-ordered of worlds. Mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras adopted a multi-disciplinary approach based on the idea that the world could be explained in terms of the simple mathematical principles of music and astronomy. The gardens that Ödlund’s diagrammatical works represent can be viewed as miniatures of this complex of ideas. Her point of departure here is the magic square, a mathematical arrangement of numbers in which the sum of the included numbers is always the same, regardless of whether one chooses to calculate it along a row, a column, or a diagonal. The history of the magic square has been fruitful ground for both visual art and literature, as its symbolic meaning harkens back to the many millennia when astronomy and astrology were a single discipline. […] Despite the closed nature of their geometrical shape Ödlund’s gardens communicate a multifaceted allegory which houses not just plants and winds, but also rhythm and direction, magic and science, electrical fields and energies, and the quantum and subatomic levels.

Ödlund’s ‘diagrammatical works’, based on ‘the magic square’, in the group The Square Shaped Garden also tells a story about the hope that sometimes stems from a completely square allotment model, as explained by Ödlund herself, in a conversation (with writer and journalist Elin Unnes, who offered Ödlund the allotment garden in question in 2019) published in Systema Naturae, 2020):

Because it really is an allotment - a piece of land that you’re alloted. And you can make this little plot of land your starting point, where you get a chance to start over, mentally, on a small scale, in this disastrous situation we’ve put ourselves in. It becomes a way to change course on your own, at least a little. That’s a good thing. It actually works. You can dig where you stand. On your little allotment. It’s a good place to start.

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Growing the Third Ear Under the Great Astral Mother Tree, 2022.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions

CFHILL, Stockholm, Growing the Third Ear Under the Great Astral Mother Tree, 2022.

Literature

(Eds.) Christine Ödlund & Louise Belfrage, Growing the Third Ear Under the Great Astral Mother Tree, 2022, no. 55, illustrated full page in colour.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation