The Glass and Metal Garden

The Glass and Metal Garden is a landscape consisting of structures made from recycled glass and steel. This garden has been presented during the Montreal International Mosaicultures held at the Montreal Botanical Garden during summer 2013. This fall, this garden was transported and installed permanently in Blainville Equestrian Park.

The singularity of the Glass and Metal Garden is that it consists of recycled and reclaimed materials to which my team and I have given a second life. This landscape is crossed by a path made from finely crushed glass bottles. Near this path, there is a green wall in which old glass bottles have been integrated. This path and this wall symbolize the ability of glass to be recycled to infinity, and allows the people who walks in the garden to imagine the thousands of cocktails, parties and suppers in which these bottles were involved...

The Glass and Metal Garden is also composed of various steel structures. The path at the entry is edged with silver obelisks. Gradually, as you walk through the garden, these architectural elements are rusting little by little, as if time and weather were doing their work. This path takes the visitor to the central room where is standing a huge rusty steel structure where a waterfall gushes into a pool at its base. This structure weighing 5 tons was made from old steel panels coming from a recycling facility dismantled a few years ago. The metal transformation through time is also symbolized by different plants whose flowers and leaves are silver, gray, orange, brown or purple, recalling the various states of the steel, sometimes shiny, sometimes oxidized.

The most striking elements of the Glass and Metal Garden are unquestionably the spectacular insects sculptures - including a 5 meters long giant ant - created by my dear friend, artist-welder Jeffrey McDonald. His sculptures, made from used auto parts, old tools and utensils, give the ensemble a unique theatrical touch.

I designed this garden as a progression through a universe where time does its work by slowly rusting in the structures that compose it. I also wanted it to be a place for meditation and reflection on the impermanence of things, events and beings. I hope that people who will visit The Glass and Metal Garden wil realize that beauty is everywhere - often where we least expect it -, even in empty wine bottles and old pieces of rusty metal !