Slotted between the de Kooning bronze and the Leger mosaic in the NGV sculpture garden is an art installation of a different kind. It changes daily, needs watering and is fit for eating. Composed of edible plants growing out of vessels concocted from former advertising banners, concrete and plastic, this living exhibit will be tended and harvested over the next four months as part of the wide-ranging exhibition, Melbourne Now.
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Devised by the design consultancy Urban Commons, the installation is both an ephemeral art piece and a practical demonstration of the ways in which edible gardening can foster community ties.
When Justin Hutchinson and Shawn Ashkanasy set up Urban Commons in 2011, Hutchinson was living in an apartment in Brunswick with two young children and no garden, while Ashkanasy was working in the kitchen of a Flinders Lane restaurant that threw out vast amounts of food waste.
Both say they felt a keen sense of removal from the food cycle and from the communities that are forged around such processes as food growing, harvesting and composting. So, having each studied industrial design, the pair set about devising ways to create edible urban gardens that also function as social spaces.
Until now, their edible-social installations have predominantly been temporary, but now they have come up with a set of planter boxes that can be installed long term.
"We wanted to challenge conventional ideas about how and where you grow food," Ashkanasy says. "It can be fun and playful and these planter boxes can almost be part of the furniture in the way they create spaces."
The silky smooth concrete pots and heavy-duty plastic "plots" unveiled at Melbourne Now can be arranged in a multitude of configurations. Designed to green everything from car parks and footpaths to office courtyards and art institution forecourts, they can be stacked, zigzagged or arranged in geometric clusters. On the social side, they come with attachable bench seats and horticulturally, they offer two different soil depths and a range of drainage systems.
At the NGV, they snake alongside the former advertising-banner planters that Hutchinson and Ashkanasy have fashioned expressly for the exhibition. While the vessels themselves have their own clean and graphic appeal, it's the vegetation that adds another dimension.
The Melbourne Now ones, which visitors will be invited to tend and harvest, have been planted by landscape architect and horticulturalist Alistair Kirkpatrick, who has an eye for the unconventional.
While Kirkpatrick has selected traditional summer food crops such as capsicum, eggplant, tomato and basil, he has also chosen several species commonly considered weeds and Australian plants that don't typically feature in kitchen gardens.
Kirkpatrick says the aim is to raise awareness of the roles that can be played in the kitchen garden by a broader palette of plants.
Despite many gardeners considering purslane, dandelion and chickweed the bane of their existence, for example, Kirkpatrick encourages us to start thinking of them as an edible "resource".
Similarly, he urges us to note the edible nature of many native plants. For Melbourne Now he has selected Acacia melanoxylon (which has edible seeds), Syzygium smithii (with edible fruit) and Banksia integrifolia (Aboriginals used the flowers for a form of cordial) under-planted with such native offerings as Clematis microphylla (the tap root is edible) and Tetragonia tetragonioidies (orWarrigal greens, one of the first Australian plants to be eaten by Europeans.)
Although the trees would not forever flourish within the confines of a pot (or, in this case, a 400-litre former-advertising-banner-bag), Kirkpatrick says it is a matter of showing the versatility of a range ofplants.
The entire landscape is also about showing the versatility of communal areas in our streets and buildings.
"This is not about closing space off," Ashkanasy says.
"It's about understanding why people want to stay living in cities and addressing the barriers to people connecting through gardens."
Urban Commons' garden is at the NGV International, as part of Melbourne Now, until March 23. Go to urbancommons.com.au for more information about the installation.