Garden Pieces

Round the Garden, the title of the first of three visual poems that make up Garden Pieces, seems at first to conjure up an old, half-forgotten feeling of spinning round and round and round until you fall over flat onto the damp, green grass. But rather than the fast antics of childhood, we’re presented with a more sober type of turning, as if we’re searching for a small thing lost amongst the leaves, the imperfect cadence of the piano score painting the scene in an unsettling hue.

In the second poem, Garden Fliers, the sombre garden scene is suddenly replaced by bright flashes of primary colour and scratchy, hand-drawn images—some abstract shapes, others more representational, like the wings of a bird or the fluke of a whale. The slow and unnerving music of Round the Garden shifts into a jaunty piece in 7/4. The images become frenetic, morphing into a sort of hand-drawn visual bouquet reminiscent of later single-frame floral works by Rose Lowder.

For Grove, the final piece of the film, we shift back into a more severe tone. Wandering through dense trees, Tait’s camera lingers on dark nooks and crannies in the understory, the sunlight piercing through gaps in the canopy and falling in blotches of bright white onto the leaves below. A black cat wanders around among the foliage. The music gives way to birdsong, and we seem to settle into a peculiar, tentative kind of calm.

Jack Guariento
Filmmaker and programmer