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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE [01]
(pic 31-5-09 / to WWN)

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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE [02]
(pic 15-6-09 / to W)

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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE [03]
(pic 15-6-09 / to SE)

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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-1: 'NATURAL') - ROSE-BOWER SIT-PLACE [04]
(paste-up 2-pics 15-6-09 / to E)

To evoke 'eden' (a pre-gardening place) the extravagant beauty of cultivated roses must be allowed to spread uncontrollably in order to assert the splendour of a 'wild' reality ... a natural super-abundance !  
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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-2: PATTERNED) - WITH ROSE-ARCH [02]
(pic 31-5-09 / to SW)

GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-2: PATTERNED)

(pic 19-5-09 / to NW)

The most simple division of a rectangle is into rectangles, the next is into triangles. Radii define a centre and a centre has a special significance as "the still point of the turning world" and as the meeting place and disappearance of all paths - so it seems it must be emphasised and its significance modelled !

GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-2: PATTERNED) - NEW PLOT PLANNING

(pic 28-8-10 / to NE)

The problem of deciding the disposition of 'appropriate' shapes when a plot must be planned at its inception! Here the desire for a recreational lawn must be reconciled with the requirement that an allotment plot is at least 60% vegetables. Regions must have shapes, but with no examples and no time for them to be defined by necessary use the only resort is to summon the absolutes of circles and symmetry.
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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - AN 'ALMOST-GARDEN' PATCH [01] - FENCE & 'ENTRY-GATE'
(pic 13-10-09 / to NE)

A narrow slice of this allotment plot is confined between 'garden-type' trellis-fences, one of which - with its (in this case useless and unused) central gate flanked by rose-bush 'hedges' - suggests the 'road-facing' fence of a suburban 'front-garden'. 
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GUN SITE: GARDEN (TYPE-3: SIGNAGE) - AN 'ALMOST-GARDEN' PATCH [02]
(pic 1-6-09 / to E)

Behind its symmetrical 'exterior fence' this almost-garden dissolves into a desultory sprinkle of casual and formal (eg: hanging-baskets) initiatives.
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The sinister is never far from kitsch - its resort to visual clarity as a sign and substitute for unity and subject definition, far from revealing, gives the impression that something is being hidden and stimulates paranoid associating. 
Note that for an ideal to seem real even the means of its physical maintenance must be hidden, or at least 'idealised'. Here the locked tool-chest is as near 'ideal' as can be realised in these circumstances, a box that on the one hand models the perfection of an ideal solid and on the other seeks to 'disappear', hiding inside its 'average environmental colour' of dull-green (similar to army camouflage) and sharing its clean geometrical pavement 'work-area' with an attention-distracting pot of flowers. 

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When the visual clarity of kitsch is softened and confused (as in this case by sun-glare and compositional chaos) paranoia is lulled and a dream such as 'romantic ruin' may emerge.
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GUN SITE: WOODEN COMPOSTER [01] - SEAT-ENCLOSURE

(pic 29-5-09 / to EEN)
This extraordinary 'monument' conjoins practicality and gratuitous form-invention. The agenda/motivation of its maker seem to go so far beyond a normal allotment's ad hoc accumulation of facilities for work and rest, that I felt it could not be catagorised as (merely) a 'Nexus'. It seems as if an overriding raison d'etre that is 'sculptural', subjective, monolithic, directed its making.
Encircling a quadrant of space at a plot's corner is a giant compost bin: a curved wooden trough, whose inner face, elaborated with 'found' wood and extraneous objects, backs a strip of seating facing a 'forecourt' edged by plants.

It seems made by someone whose horticultural practicality cannot overwhelm their aesthetic fascination with eroded wood, or their 'sculptural drive' to form a personally significant environment.
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GUN SITE: WOODEN COMPOSTER [04] - PLUS SEAT-ENCLOSURE - NORTH END
(pic 20-1-11 / to S)
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GUN SITE: WOODEN COMPOSTER [06] - PLUS SEAT-ENCLOSURE - FROM REAR
(pic 28-8-10 / to NNW)
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GUN SITE:  WOODEN COMPOSTER [11] - COMPOSTER EXTENSION IN PROCESS
(paste-up 3-pics 7-7-12 / to S)

In early 2012 the emphasis changed from the 2009 curved composter that supported a seat and helped to define a sort of 'contemplative' enclosure, tucked under the trees at the plot's N-end, to a new apprehension of the extent of the whole plot - a sight that seems to have nourished the composter's trough to quickly grow a long trailing arm that takes possession of its whole length.  

GUN SITE: WOODEN COMPOSTER [12] - SEAT-ENCLOSURE CLEARED & COMPOSTER EXTENSION IN PROCESS 
(pic 20-7-12 / to S)

The combined composter and seat-enclosure at the N-end is in prosess of being cleared. The whole scheme of wooden structures is changing. 

GUN SITE:  WOODEN COMPOSTER [13] - COMPOSTER EXTENSION IN PROCESS
(paste-up 2-pics 20-7-12 / to SSW)

GUN SITE:  WOODEN COMPOSTER [14] - EXTENDED - SW END
(pic 14-10-12 / to EEN)
The long and increasingly shallow compost trough now curves down the plot's length and joins a pre-existing rectangular plank-edged bed - drawing a shape like the handle and head of an enormous axe. 

GUN SITE: FRANK [01] - CENTRE-PLOT FENCES ETC.
(pic 19-5-09 / to NW)

This person does everything in a spirit of 'pragmatic-play', thus everything he makes (even with minimum attention) is simultaneously practical and aesthetic ... even the hose is held against the plot's perimeter in rhythmic waves across its background mesh of fence (like a gridded graph). Here [unlike the previous example] the 'aesthetic' aspect is in fact an inevitable ''value-added' consequence of a 'play' of very pure improvisational practicality rather than an outcome of what is often patronisingly called 'artistic talent'.
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GUN SITE: FRANK [04] - SCARECROW
(pic 31-5-09 / to SE)
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GUN SITE: FRANK [05] - TWO SCARECROWS (STRAW-HAT & MOP-HEAD)
(paste-up 2-pics 28-8-10 / to NW)

When I first saw these figures I experienced a shock of fear because they did not move. Their postures are so life-like because they imply motion, but caught as if in a stopped film. It seemed, on the deserted allotment with no audience but me, actors had been employed to pose as if in motion but like statues. My 'location interpreter' was challenged and panicked my flight impulse (are birds likewise wired ?!). 
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GUN SITE: FRANK [06] -TWO SCARECROWS (STRAW-HAT & HOODIE)
(pic 28-8-10 / to EES)
There were three of these almost-beings, their differing styles of working effort showed not only in their gestures but in every stretch and ripple of their clothes. Note that the posture of Mr Straw-Hat seems different from the rear - having passed and looked back he seemed to have moved, though still as stopped as before - there was a sort of horror there as if at any moment they would begin!
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GUN SITE: FRANK [07] - SCARECROW (STRAW-HAT)
(pic 28-8-10 / to NNW)

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GUN SITE: FRANK [08] - SCARECROW (MOP-HEAD)
(pic 28-8-10 / to EES)

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GUN SITE: FRANK [10] - SCARECROW (MOP-HEAD)
(pic 28-8-10 / to WWN)

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GUN SITE: FRANK [11] - FOUR SCARECROWS
(pic 20-1-11 / to EEN)
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GUN SITE: FRANK [12] - TWO SCARECROWS
(pic 20-1-11 / to NW)
Both figures look down, as if seriously concerned with working on the land. Their postures and gestures are forcefully 'intentional':

Straw-Hat: His leg-shadow emphasising the front leg bending) as if in movement; his stretched arm - pulled by the long shovel threaded through the sleeve wrist-strap - seems to reach and grab it, as if intending to swing it to his left side to dig the new mulch he looks down at.

Racket-Face: His flattened trouser-leg is extraordinarily (and coincidentally) like 'cubistic' illustration; his two legs are so perspectively different as to suggest spatial movement; he gestures behind him as if discussing the treatment of the plot.

The figures relate to each other in what seems an intentional composition. The bodies slightly bend towards each other, seemingly cooperative. Straw-Hat's stretched arm and Racket-Face's flattened trouser-leg visually relate from top left to bottom right; Racket-Face's thrust out arm and Straw-Hat's nearest leg visually relate from top right to bottom left. They work together in a visually dynamic arrangement.

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GUN SITE: SCARECROW
(pic 19-5-09 / to NW)

This is a quite different 'scarecrow' from Frank's - it's a 'model' of a thing, not a direct invocation of sensational action. However it is similarly (though not so thoroughly) fright-invoking because, simultaneously with one's apprehension that it is a mere pile of objects, one has an evolved/instinctive response to its body-language 'gestures' and grotesque deformity, which catch our automatic attention and even provoke an empathy that subliminally 'proves' the object is alive. The presence of such a mental split between the phenomenal and subliminal is a scary experience - manifesting here not so much in the direct perception of the external object, but as a sense that ones mind is 'occupied' by it - a kink in ones 'mental facade' like a nudge of madness!
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