Volume 5 (Retreat) – Winter 2022
A magical rock garden in the mountain
Set against the slopes of the Magaliesberg, renowned South African artist Geoffrey Armstrong, and his wife Wendy, have been on a 30-year journey to transform their large mountainside property
Words by Melody Emmett Photography by Elsa Young Art Direction by Charl Francois Edwards Production by LOOKBOOK Studio
With special thanks to Vincent Truter
ABOVE SPREAD The veranda overlooks the conceptual artwork of the garden with bold brush strokes of rare indigenous plants and wild Magaliesberg grasses dotted throughout.
ABOVE The sandstone ‘portal’ stands at the foot of the garden where Geoffrey has carved it to near non-existence and will continue to do so until there is nothing left.
Renowned South African artist Geoffrey Armstrong has been sculpting a rectangular, one-metre block of diamond sandstone for 15 years. He tentatively names it ‘Opening to the Universe’. ‘It is getting more and more refined,’ he says, explaining that there are limits to working with diamond cutting blades, a hammer and chisel, and grinding discs. Parts of the work are so fine, they seem to be close to disintegration. The sculpture evokes a sense of the ethereal, but Geoffrey asserts, ‘I am practical, not mystical. This would be an opening into something. We are very basically sexual. That’s what we are here for: procreation,’ he says.
It has been a 30-year journey for the artist couple to transform their 37-hectare property into the vast multi-media, magnum opus that it is today. The individual and collective processes followed by Wendy – also a famed South African artist – and Geoffrey are distinctive: philosophical inquiry, mathematical precision, intuitive intelligence, a capacity to see beneath and beyond reality, practical innovation and, somewhere in the mix, Geoffrey’s belief in DNA and the meaning of life.
ABOVE In the modernist language of concrete, volume and light, the house is a sculpture in itself, seamlessly blending nature and structure.
In the beginning, there was no water on the property and attempts to drill for it failed, so Geoffrey came up with a plan to divert a fountain from the top of the koppie on a neighbouring farm. And today water cascades into 20 pools. ‘We didn’t really think about the future,’ says Wendy. ‘We had this bare patch running down the mountain and our first thought was to stop the erosion. I knew something about this because as a child, growing up in Zimbabwe, I became part of a farmers club. It was something that I knew all my life: don’t let the soil run away.’
They made walls of earth to stop the water running down the hill, which were later replaced with rocks, for which the garden is famous. Building the house and negotiating with the plants was the approach in the beginning. ‘The garden wasn’t a conscious, planned thing at all. It just came about,’ explains Wendy. ‘About 25 years ago, we joined Operation Wildflower and started collecting aloes.’ Wendy, who has taken photographs since childhood, is continuously photographing plants, which appear instinctively in the lines and forms of her paintings. ‘They are deeply there,’ she says. ‘I use forms in nature, that I see all the time and I respond. It is an evolving response.’
The couple have had this always-evolving garden ‘project’ of theirs – as artists, they both stopped exhibiting commercially years ago. It is not meaningful to them and Geoffrey, in particular, resists what he refers to as ‘the club factor.’ When configuring the garden, Geoffrey initially employed up to seven men to help transport the rocks he brought onto the property: massive rocks from road construction nearby; flat rocks from farmers ploughing fields; rocks removed from the top of the mountain to make way for cattle grazing, and Magaliesberg white rocks – used in Wendy’s ‘white garden’ – among others, were collected. Together with unwanted trees and discarded wood, these were transformed into sculptures, bridges, steps, benches, raised pathways, and unexpected sanctuaries with surprising vistas.
ABOVE At once a dining area and gallery space, the home is both a container for art and the artwork. Pictured here are Wendy’s paintings that became her focus after years as a master printmaker.
The house dissolves into the garden, which over time became the priority. ‘We didn’t want it to become one of those building monstrosities with marble floors and glass and so on, so we built the garden instead,’ says Geoffrey. One of the incomplete rooms in the house is now a walk-in painting, unintentionally incorporating symbols from ‘sacred geometry’, regarded by some teachings as the blueprint of creation. ‘There are circles, and I am fond of circles because they are about life, about cells.’ Geoffrey says. It’s a piece of work that will never be complete, and rather be added to continuously as time goes on.
Wendy, although initially invested in the process, gave up on the idea of creating a botanical garden after years of keeping the meticulous records required, because it became too labour intensive. Nevertheless, visiting and walking through the garden with the artists is an adventure. The smallest shift is noticed and welcomed with enchantment: A huge-stemmed variety from the Yucca family, which flower once in a life time; Boesmansdruif; Helichrysum splendidum with it silver-grey foliage that smells like camphor, Ledebouria, its bulbous base clothed in purplish-brown outer sheaths; the otherworldly slow-growing succulent Cyphostemma juttae, commonly known as Wild Grape; the ancient-looking Adenia spenosa with stems resembling an elephant’s foot… I make a note to find out more. Wendy introduces me to a concept in Japanese aesthetics: ‘Yugen’, meaning graceful and delicate and simultaneously, dark and mysterious. It describes a movement of the heart that is evoked in me when I sense the fragile interdependence between the natural world, the curated garden, the house, the artworks and the artists. Within this complexity, the artists have created an alternative reality – a parallel universe, where the old world falls apart and
a more meaningful world is revealed.
ABOVE Tempestuous DNA splicers, the two artists have merged rock, earth, leaf and drop. Pattern within pattern within plant within path, the vibrant vivid fractal of their creations holds a space, one of sanctuary and vital living chaos.
ABOVE Stairways and oscillating arrangements of stone and organic sculptures abound the landscape; here, a quiet staircase next to Wendy’s studio leads to the roof of the home. Every view is framed by organic sculptures and considered structures that hold art, landscape and architecture in dynamic tension.
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