What in the World is More Beautiful?
2 July – 22 August 2004
Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews Botanic Garden, St Andrews Preservation Trust

Gardening is in. Between the Tate’s latest exhibition, Art of the Garden, and the Crawford Arts Centre’s current offering, What in the World is More Beautiful?, we are reminded that art and gardening are not so very different. Both grapple constantly with the thorny question of beauty. Both are about the creative process as well as the final product. Is nature simply the artist’s medium? Surely it’s a creative collaborator.

There’s plenty of collaboration in the St Andrews exhibition, between artists, beekeepers, floral arts clubs and museums. Nature gets to collaborate too – a colony of bees has helped to create a sculpture, and at the time of my visit the thistles and butterflies were stubbornly refusing to work together, perhaps because of creative differences.

This exhibition is a second curatorial collaboration for Glasgow-based artists Susanne Nørregärd Nielsen and Gair Dunlop, as a development of their shared interest in the Picturesque Movement. The artists are among a group of seven showing in and around the Crawford Arts Centre, all concerned with various aspects of horticulture, landscaping, and the environment.

The Crawford Arts Centre is one of the group of unfortunate arts organisations whose future funding has been thrown into uncertainty. It doesn’t make sense, when this show demonstrates the obvious strengths of the centre: partnerships with organisations, clubs and individuals throughout Fife and beyond, extending way past the conventional art gallery audiences.

Nielsen’s Mondrian flowerbed stands proudly in the local Botanic Gardens, made up of flowers which the artist secretly loved to paint, behind a public show of abstract grids and squares. The horticulturalist who helped Nielsen identify the various species of flower in Mondrian’s paintings was scathing about the artist’s choice of plants. They were not ideal specimens, he complained. That, again, is the thorny issue of beauty.

Catrìona Black, a-n magazine, September 2004