upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
The Lost Garden presented by The Woodlands, is a site-specific installation and performance by Martha McDonald (ACG '14) that has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and a Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grant.
The Lost Garden explores impermanence and the fragile nature of memory at The Woodlands. In the 18th century, The Woodlands was William Hamilton’s spectacular botanic garden and greenhouse of exotic plants, but it nearly disappeared in the rapid urbanization of the early 19th century. The garden was saved from extinction by being transformed into a cemetery, or “memory garden.”
Drawing on the language of Victorian handcrafts like jewelry made from human hair and wax flowers under domes, McDonald's installation of knitted flowers memorializes the lost plants from Hamilton’s garden. The performance takes audiences on an intimate song tour of the Victorian cemetery and into McDonald’s installation inside Hamilton’s 18th century mansion to conjure the dream of the lost garden.
The Lost Garden will be performed over multiple dates between September 26, 2014 and October 5, 2014. McDonald’s site-specific installation in the Hamilton Mansion will be on view through October 18, 2014.
For more information, or to buy tickets, please visit http://woodlandsphila.org/thelostgarden.
