Ian Hamilton Finlay, Stonypath, Little Sparta, sculpture, garden design, architectural symbolism, column base, sacred grove, kosmopoeisis, culture, nature

Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay is best-known for his concrete poetry of the 1960s and his later work which presents a unique combination of poetry, sculpture and gardening. Finlay approached gardens as ‘a text’. This essay offers ‘a reading’ of his stone column bases, i.e. bases of classical columns installed in front of real, growing trees. To clarify the symbolic role of the column, attention is drawn to the art of the Archaic period of the Greek culture. Finlay’s artistic concept is seen as representing kosmopoeisis, a process of transforming chaos into the cosmos, which is, by its nature, of an artistic character. The artwork as a complex artistic statement touches upon a number of crucial topics (such as nature, cultivation, order, beauty, piety, or violence); this essay tries to elucidate their interrelationship.