Imagining Paradise - The Aestheticized Garden as Articulation of a Mythic Western Imaginary of Paradise

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY: This study explores the extent to which the aestheticized garden can coercively articulate a mythic Western imaginary of paradise as the site for an occidental exotic fantasy of the East. The splendour of Islamic 'paradise gardens', together with imports including foreign plants, Eastern novelties and manuscripts such as the Arabian'Nights narrative, played a major role in influencing the Western construct of the 'orient' as exotic, erotic, alluring and ultimately 'other'. This distorted, miragePlike Western view of the 'orient', contrived without the consent of its inhabitants, denies the corresponding reality of its geographical location. This theory offers a lens through which to view the Western obsession with the exoticized 'other' – both in the East and in the Americas – and the ensuing European mania for collecting rarities, compiling 'cabinets of curiosities', and creating hothouses as paradisiac microcosms housing outlandish botanical collections. My practical work, split into the Pomegranate' Collection and the Gifappeltjie' Collection, aims to simultaneously rely on and subvert this exoticizing gaze in a series of highly symbolic contemporary jewellery objects that offer glimpses of a fragmented, aestheticized botanical paradise.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University