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A Tower in the Minds of Others - Public sculpture

Commissioned by Parabola for the ‘Tatton Park Biennial’, A Tower in the Minds of Others was a temporary hybrid structure incorporating English garden sheds and Japanese pagoda design. Coutts received a Daiwa Foundation Award (2008) to travel to Kyoto to conduct research into pagoda structures and their setting in Japanese gardens. The site of the commission, the Japanese Garden at Tatton Park in Cheshire, was designed in 1911 by a team of English garden designers, drawing from Japanese books on Japanese garden design written for an English audience. In her study into processes of translation between cultures, Coutts’s focus was on how the siting of built structures in a garden environment can reflect deep-rooted cultural values that are difficult to shift. The final structure referenced both the hidden, secretive inward-facing activities of the English garden shed user and the external elevated vistas created for pagodas designed exclusively for Japanese emperors.

In his review of the Tatton Park Biennial (2008), Kevin Hunt commented on Coutts’s work: ‘This oddly compelling tower exists to accentuate the artifice of the garden, the notion of the natural and therefore purity embedded in something that is essentially man made and orchestrated for the purpose of human satisfaction’ (https://www.a-n.co.uk/join_in/article/470070/362344).

The ‘Tatton Park Biennial’ was visited by 100,000 people and was accompanied by a 112-page catalogue, Tatton Park Biennial, 2008. In 2009, the Biennial was short-listed for the Lever Prize and the Museum & Heritage Awards for Excellence in the Creation of a Temporary Exhibition.