VIVARIAN Artist’s Statement Dr. Ian Bonde 2025. ‘Vivarium’, Latin for ‘place of life’ is a generic term for an enclosure which houses animals, plants, fungi, etc., for the purposes of observation or research. For example, an ‘Aquarium’ or a ‘Terrerium’. This glass window box gallery suggests an enclosure for contemplating life, as expressed through art objects and ideas.

‘Vivarian’, an occupant of such an environment. By definition, ‘Semiotics’ in visual art is the study of how images, objects, and other visual elements convey meaning and information through a system of signs and symbols. It explores how visual representations generate meaning, how we interpret them, and the complex relationship between the image, the viewer, and the cultural context. This sculptural installation, comprised of one binary wall element and 12 x floor elements, uses signs, symbols and signifiers to present stages of the ‘journey of life’. It employs a number of personal symbols, including some from previous projects, in an ongoing search for universality within individual life experience and personal perspective.
The wall work (in two parts) is not a Maze (a puzzle), nor is it a Labyrinth (a single path for contemplation); it is a ‘Meander’, a design style, which was originally developed by 18th-century English landscape architect, Batty Langley. His pathway plans, proposed for European castles, were intended to encourage gentle strolls through formal gardens with cul-de-sacs for rest and polite conversation by the people of high society.

Inspired by his groundbreaking work, this original wall design signifies a metaphor for the journey of life with its many twists, turns and stations along the way, toward an inevitable demise. Both are vertical planographic overviews with four cardinal entry points of possible pathways embodied in low relief. The negative pathway through a plane and the positive pathway on top of the plane are a split mirror image, like two halves of a vision, two perspectives to travel, two ways of seeing the journey. The 12 x floor works signify a progression from a state of entropy, through collective cultural artefacts, to individual birth, life, death and cremation. These objects relate to universal roadside markers (tall poles with coloured stripes), which exist in many countries to guide travellers through jungles and snow alike. The circular bases include stepped nodules that are unique ‘architectonic forms’ based on mathematical shapes. They were developed through ‘circling of the square’, a technique reminiscent of Baroque mirror pools and formal garden parterre designs. The cultural references also extend to three-dimensional stepped pyramids found within many ancient
human societies.

Bamboo, a fast-growing ‘grass’, was chosen to symbolise the relatively rapid birth, life and passing of an individual within human societies. It is naturally a rhizomatic organism with interconnected nodes of growth. As per French philosophers’ Gitarre and Deleuze theory, this interconnectedness relates to modern human societies and advanced human constructs such as the World Wide Web, which relies on multiple nodes rather than a central hierarchical structure. From rusted entropic beginnings through collective cultural expressions, an individual life is born pure ‘bone white’, lives a life ‘blood red’, dies a ‘deathly black,’ then progresses through a cremation transition (matt black/ burnt tips) into darkness and demise: expiration.

Observing the Vivarian journey from eternity to brief existence, to… eternity.