Art can make an impact in the most surprising of places. You wouldn’t expect to find a radical artist intervention at The Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in May—a major fixture of London’s summer social season where any thought of art usually revolves around a tasteful water feature or an artfully placed rock. But this year contemporary art found a prime spot on the Flower Show’s main avenue, where the maverick artist-activist Bob and Roberta Smith set up a temporary HQ for his ongoing campaign for art in education.
The Royal Academician’s zeal for educational reform has drawn considerable attention over the years. In 2015, for example, he stood as a parliamentary candidate in the UK general election in an attempt to unseat the former education secretary Michael Gove, which raised the cause’s profile (though he drew only 273 votes).
At the Chelsea show, Bob and Roberta was conspicuously armed with a plethora of his trademark painted placards embellished with such slogans as “ALL SCHOOLS SHOULD BE ART SCHOOLS”; “ART MAKES PEOPLE POWERFUL” and—appropriately—“GARDENS ARE THE NEW ART GALLERIES”. Using these visual aids, he held court in an artist studio bothy set within undulating dune-like landscape designed by the prizewinning sustainable designer Nigel Dunnett. “All schools should have art spaces and this shed with its big window is a window on the world,” Bob and Roberta tells me, adding “What I represent is the imagination: arts in schools provides kids with imaginations for looking out upon the world.”
Bob and Roberta was making his Chelsea debut courtesy of the Scottish charity Hospitalfield Arts, a large estate and arts centre in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, which had been invited by Dunnett to collaborate on an art-themed garden for Chelsea. “A few years ago we got Nigel to design our walled garden at Hospitalfield,” says Lucy Byatt, the centre’s director. “Then, because he likes what we do as an organisation, he asked us to make an application for a garden that would be at Chelsea”.
Coastal connection
Housed in one of Scotland’s most important 19th-century Arts and Crafts buildings, which was run as an art school until the 1980s, Hospitalfield now has an international reputation for artist residencies and art-led public outreach programmes. For this project, “Nigel was interested in making a design that offered an inspiration and setting for art practices,” Byatt says. Byatt was also responsible for bringing in Bob and Roberta, who had been a resident artist at Hospitalfield back in 2014, during which he ran a popular education project with local children.
The garden at Chelsea paid direct tribute to the coastal location of Hospitalfield Arts and the town of Arbroath, Dunnett explains. “This is the Arbroath sand dune landscape as reinterpreted through the eyes of an artist or a sculpture,” he says. “What I’ve tried to do is make the whole garden a sculpture.”
Celeb-snagging
During his residency at the flower show, Bob and Roberta attracted the attention of many of its 150,000-plus visitors, especially when he made sorties out of the bothy to paint botanical watercolours, clad in a scarlet suit embellished with the declaration “ART IS YOUR HUMAN RIGHT”. King Charles and Queen Camilla even took a look as they passed by, and others who stopped by to converse with this radical cuckoo in Middle England’s genteel nest included the singer Joan Armatrading, the actor and comedian Jennifer Saunders and the British-Trinidadian peer and former children’s TV presenter Floella Benjamin. The garden also attracted a gang of Smith’s fellow artists led by Lucy Skaer, who created a poster and plant list for the Hospitalfield garden, along with David Shrigley and Rosalind Nashashibi. Then to top it all, the Royal Horticultural Society judges registered their approval by awarding the Hospitalfield Arts Garden a prestigious silver gilt medal.
Following the razzmatazz of its Chelsea incarnation the Hospitalfield Arts Garden is now making its way north to a permanent Scottish home in the Ladyloan Primary School in Arbroath, a newly built school on the town’s seafront. It was always intended that this would be the garden’s ultimate destination, and thanks to support from the grant-making scheme Project Giving Back, it is due to open there this summer in an expanded role as an art studio and educational recourse.
For future generations of children the Hospitalfield Arts Garden and its artist bothy will fulfil Bob and Roberta’s belief that, in suitably artistic hands, gardens can be as powerful as galleries as agents for creativity and change.
