Muse’s Garden,
San Francisco
Dabney Studio was approached by an avid collector and patron of the arts to extend his public salons into his outdoor space. We saw it as a perfect opportunity to create a space by multiple artists for other artists. The garden is used by the client, artists-in-residence, and the public for quarterly salons and shows.
Dabney collaborated with writer Molly Caro May to create an origin myth of a garden muse based on Dabney’s detailed site analysis of the area. With May’s completed myth in hand, Dabney then began her design.
Crushed oyster shells, pine needles, and cobblestones and redwood, all reclaimed. The story brought these materials to life. A copy of the muse story is given to interested visitors. (See May’s story below.)
Collaborators: Charles Smith of Modernscapes, Randall Whitehead Lighting Solutions, and Molly Caro May. Garden phography © Liz Daly, White Crowned Sparrow © Grigory Heaton, creative process images © Samantha Dabney.
The Muse of 520 Clipper Street
by Molly Caro May
“One afternoon, back in the untold era, fog hung over the coast, hung so low it blended into the white dunes themselves. Out to sea, a clipper ship tacked back and forth, deciding whether to come in or continue on, and there, right then, beneath the sand dunes, stirred an essence. It had lived dormant all along. But now it craved being-ness Sand particles began to gather, some rising up, others blowing in, skittering along the surface.
It was a slow gathering. Under a shrouded sun, the mound emerged. It grew and grew and eventually stars flickered in a black sky and they whispered, “She is coming, she is coming, the one we need is coming.”
In the morning, she woke up and stretched—a muse born of a sand dune, a woman made completely of sand, the same size and shape of a human but aglow.
She gazed out to the slate ocean. It was her origin point. But she had been cast to go elsewhere, inland. Where? She did not know.
It is true, they say, that she stood for centuries waiting for the message. When a flock of white-crowned sparrows finally appeared, she looked up. “We have been called to transport you,” they explained. “You will have to undo me to move me,” she responded, “It is the only way.” So sand grain by sand grain, they flew her at last to her new home.
At the foot of a willow tree, she gathered into form again. It was a narrow garden, a place where artists would be re-called to their art.
“Why here?” she called out to the willow, wanting to know her purpose.
“You must remind them how to disintegrate,” it said, “They run from it; they fear it; they forget its importance.”
It did not take her long to inhabit 520 Clipper Street. She lives here still.
During the day, she collects pine needles, arranges them in patterns, and then blows them away. When the willow strands part in the breeze, it is her doing.
She sets out small cups to hold the rain as it trickles down, down, down the garden. When the white-crowned sparrows pass through on migration, they hover here and drop one lone shell. She raises her arms to greet them. With one light squeeze, she crushes the new shell in her palm. It joins her art of many crushed shells. Crushed back to the source. For sustenance, she eats small handfuls of moss, sucking the water from it, nibbling on its green.
Each time she moves, she must undo herself again. Some would consider this a hardship. Not for her. When she laughs, the leaves flicker. Artists arrive. They set new intentions for their work.
They shuffle or skip around the garden. They want answers. Sometimes they forget that a moment of not knowing allows a moment of knowing.
Down leads up to the sky. If ever they hear a scattering sound, the sound of sand, the sound of particles, she is disintegrating and remaking herself elsewhere in the garden. “Art requires this,” she whispers. It is the only way to move.
The air here is dense with light, small glints of sand, shiny.
When day is done, when dark descends, she climbs into the willow, lounges in its limbs and hums—out to her sparrows, to the stars, to the many artists who have not come yet but will. This goes on through the night until, in one gasp, she lets herself fall back to earth and down, down, down, down, her sand grains tumble to the base of the garden until she is whole again and sleeping and waiting for dawn.”