Dancing with Time

John Powell lives in New Plymouth, New Zealand and is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

«Powell’s stimulating and rigorously argued book offers new insights into the ways in which we experience and understand gardens, how we conceptualise their ontology, and how we appreciate their temporality and material beauty. A timely and highly engaging account that reintroduces gardens’ distinctive qualities, features, processes, aesthetic possibilities, and arthood as sites of joy and celebration.»(Professor Samer Akkach, Founding Director, CAMEA, University of Adelaide)«Dancing with Time offers a novel account of gardens that returns them to a prized position in the artworld. Highlighting their distinctive, four-dimensional nature, this important work explains how temporality enriches our experience of gardens. The rich examination of gardens’ status as art will delight aestheticians, landscape design theorists, and garden lovers alike.» (Professor Sondra Bacharach, Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington)«A welcome addition to the growing interest in philosophical writing about gardens. ... Powell’s search for answers as to whether or not gardens can (again) be an art form and the nature of their ontological status is careful and exacting ... » (Isis Brook, «British Journal of Aesthetics», 2019)

• CONTENTS: «But Is It Art?»: Case Study of a New Zealand Garden – Changing Views: Philosophical Aesthetics (1700–2017) – Changing Places: Gardens and Philosophical Aesthetics (1700–2017) – Up the Garden Path: Some Recent Writing – Enjoying Time(s) in the Garden – What Sort of Artwork Are Gardens? – A Philosophical Detour: Definitions, Theories, and Ontologies – A New View of the Garden.