Laura Cooper and Nick Taggart
Cooper and Taggart are both artists and obsessive garden makers whose art work combines both concerns. Their own garden is both the source of inspiration and the three dimensional counterpart of their artwork. Cooper and Taggart created an outdoor amphitheater in their own garden, which is an outdoor salon for performance, readings, and video screenings.
Laura: Wanting to be a parent pre-dates the garden. I always created our garden with the wonder of a child in mind, a place that I imagined children in. Children know how to make someplace be anyplace. Through abundant planting Nick and I blur out the edges of the city so that we can imagine we are someplace else. So Lily affected me long before she was born, and that desire for wonder is in my art before her (paintings photography and installation) and in my garden design and art since.
Now that Lily and her friends have this garden, they delight in eating its fruits, making organic architecture (for themselves or for fairies,) watching the animals, making garden art, making potions.
Nick: I am inspired by my daughter Lily's watercolor drawings, her imagination and play, I began my own series of watercolors using her world as subject matter. Initially consisting of small and specific single images, the series has grown to include multi paneled sheets of paper with montages of Lily, her friends, insects, animals, fairies, toys and dolls.