The Garden of Resuscitation

The Garden of Resuscitation is a major art commission permanently located within the Norwegian woods and sculpture park of the Kistefos Museum. Following the life of a spruce tree in reverse, Marguerite’s speculative work reimagines the forest itself as a work of art, transforming a site of former industrial extraction into one of ecological reverence, regeneration and ritual.

An intricate, arboreal project, The Garden of Resuscitation unfolds a ‘journey from the dead’ – in which a piece of paper retraces its origins and is re-born within the forest – contemplating a spruce tree’s co-habitants and place within the wider ecological system. The work is experienced as an immersive journey through landscape: through a garden cultivated for an elixir, past benches cast in paper-pulp from the neighbouring paper factor, past mounds of waste mulch spawning live mushroom cultures, onto a boardwalk that weaves a walkable path into the forest. The journey culminates in a monumental sculpture of the resuscitated spruce tree, replete with traces of its parasitic and symbiotic species.

Incorporating the plants and fungi, river currents, seasonal rhythms and annual rituals into the work itself, Marguerite’s project posits crossings at the threshold of death, and questions of descendance and renewal. A garden made up of specially cultivated plants, including fireweed, raspberry, yarrow and pine, acts as an intensification of the forest’s offerings. The elixir made from this garden testifies to the mutability of artwork and life; annual gatherings will be convened for its drinking but its recipe will also develop in accordance with the growth and evolution of the plants that comprise it. Engaging ideas of repetition and reinterpretation that connect memory with the site, Marguerite conceived the work as inseparable from its place of inhabitation. Created as an ever-evolving mythology to follow the passage of time, The Garden of Resuscitation understands decomposition not as an ending, but as a process of transformation and transmission, one that holds lifeforms, stories, recipes and rituals for future generations to come.