At her small cottage in Louisville, Colorado, Karla Dakin says she tries to make art when and where she can. As she tours a reporter around her backyard garden, she notes that her garden is the first project she created for her own enjoyment during her 19 years working as a landscape architect.
The garden is lush, spontaneous, and playful. Dakin walks by splashes of orange: pumpkins growing through a dark brown wooden fence. Delicate French strawberries nestled in a green and gold bed peek their heads out. A shiny tin bathtub burbling with water in the corner of the garden has blue and white shells decorating its base.
“That’s my white trash water feature,” she says, smiling.
It’s easy to see the artistry in Dakin’s work. She blends curious touches such as an outdoor table’s oversized Lego block legs with the classic beauty of a repurposed trellis overhead. Or a small metal stencil of ponies planted in a tidy cactus garden.
But Dakin hasn’t always worked outdoors.
She previously lived in and worked in San Francisco, where she started a non-profit architecture gallery called 2AES. In New York City, she worked at the Ana Nosei Gallery. After she moved to Colorado in 1992 she realized it was time for a change.
“There was no there, there” she said of the art scene, echoing Gertrude Stein’s famous comment about her lost Oakland, Calif. home.
In an interview with ROOT magazine, Dakin said, “I was unable to participate in the art scene in the same ways I had previously. I took a landscape architecture theory class at University of Colorado Denver and followed my heart to pursue a career that would combine my arts and business background with my creativity.”
That decision led to her September, 2016 installation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art “Evolving Visions of Land and Landscape.” The exhibition runs through Jan. 15, 2017. It includes a print she created while in New York City during the ’80s: fuzzy, black and white, Dr. Seuss-esque balls.
“Those just keep coming up in my work, the fuzzy balls are the progenitor of my first permanent rooftop garden at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, which I was commissioned to do in 2007. I also made ceramic plants for the show at BMoCA, which are a whimsical response to the fuzzy balls I installed in Denver.”
The work, “Sky Trapezium,” includes wedge-like wood and metal shapes that were inspired by the Rocky Mountains, and a water feature that Dakin says was based on the marble mines in Colorado. “I was inspired by the narratives of Willa Cather, these frontier novels of women in particular who made it in the West. And fuzzy balls.”
In the summer of 2016, Dakin traveled to Northwestern Cameroon to help create “The Rock House”, a remote uninhabited structure that anyone may visit. “The Rock House” was the Republic of Cameroon’s first green rooftop garden. According to an Oct. 2016 article on Greenroofs.com, “The green roof was built to star as the pilot project of AREA, the African Research & Exchange Academy, the brainchild of Ajume Wingo, PhD.”
At his office at The University of Colorado Boulder, Wingo explained, “It’s a civic art project. Karla saw the landscape in a way that a good aesthetic would look at it. The way you see art in architecture is not the way I think about it: Life beyond necessity as a piece of art.”
Wingo wanted to create a sustainable piece of art that functioned as an example of housing possibilities. The green roof on “The Rock House” is designed to use solar power for irrigation. He also envisioned a structure made completely from the land it stands on. “I didn’t want to import anything from outside,” he said. “I wanted to show that what we had to create with at hand was something beautiful, wonderful and modern.”
That challenge resonated with Dakin, because she often recycles or uses “repurposed” materials in her art and garden constructions.
Both Dakin and Wingo believe “The Rock House” could be the start of a sustainable new way of building homes in Camaroon. According to Wingo, it has garnered a substantial amount of attention from the press, and sparked the interests of local dignitaries who might influence the future of building similar structures.
Although Dakin has created gardens all over the world for her clients, she finds the most satisfying work at her home. Late afternoon light glows through the golden aspen outside of her kitchen window, highlighting the fruit on her indoor bonsai-sized Meyer lemon tree. Outside, Dakin’s beet harvest is ready, leaves are falling, and several large spaghetti squash decorate her glass picnic table: natural beauty blending with the practical utility of home-grown food.
“My own garden is my favorite,” she says, holding a bowl full of snap peas in her arms. “I get to put things in, see what happens. That’s the thing about gardens: it’s about entropy and chaos at the same time. Things are dissolving as they are growing. It’s a sort of diabolical system, and it’s wonderful.”
Under the Flatirons 2016 