The verdantly sprawling Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, just north of Richmond, is the unlikely, but welcome backdrop of a new installation by Kate Raudenbush, a self-taught artist who amassed a following through her large-scale installations at Burning Man.
You would be forgiven for overlooking the garden as the setting of new works by an artist more closely associated with desert raves than with flora and fauna, yet this isn’t something to overlook. Incanto: An Oasis of Lyrical Sculpture, Raudenbush’s five-piece installation on the garden’s grounds feels all together fitting in its setting.
The pieces, which combine towering heavy, etched metals with flattering candle-like light, flowing water, and convex mirrors, are placed throughout the garden’s trails, working in concert with the garden’s lush late summer growing season — vines crawl up the sides of pieces and adorn them like crowns.
Allegorical in nature, Raudenbush’s Incanto pieces, which she created during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, are evocative of different phases and transformations of life. Her sculptural works invite participation. Garden visitors are encouraged to step in, sit down, and walk through the works, experiencing, as Raudenbush intends, portals to both new chapters of being and to new areas of the garden. At night, the pieces are lit from within to give you a different experience.
Created, in part, as the artist’s response and reckoning to 2020’s isolation and uncertainty, the pieces invite visitors to feel the interplay between the present world and the one just beyond, as well as the natural and the created.
“The relationship between art and nature is irresistible to me,” Raudenbush says on a beautiful summer evening.
For guests at the garden, finding Raudenbush roaming the grounds is not unusual. She stops to offer to take a picture, to explain where to stand, to offer a perspective, to admire a flower, and to encourage play.
Incanto: An Oasis of Lyrical Sculpture is on display at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden through October 29. The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. but has extended hours until 9 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays for this exhibit. 1800 Lakeside Ave., Richmond, $17 for adults, $14 for seniors and military, $8 for ages 3–12, free for under 3
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