page_title: Little Sparta
section_title: Concepts
hierarchical_section_title: Little Sparta / Concepts
caption_attribution_description: sculptures/objects in the sculpture park Little Sparta by Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland/U.K.
context_page_description: Little Sparta is a garden at Dunsyre in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, Scotland, created by artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and his wife Sue Finlay.
  The 5-acre Arcadian garden includes concrete poetry in sculptural form, polemic, and philosophical aphorisms, together with sculptures and two temples. Altogether it includes over 275 artworks by the artist, created in collaboration with numerous craftsmen and women.
context_section_description: The key concept Ian established at Little Sparta was that of the ‘garden poem', sited within an ‘area’. Finlay defined the relationship between these poem-objects and their surroundings: "Usually each area gets a small artefact, which reigns like a small deity or spirit of place. My understanding is that the work is the whole composition – the artefact in its context. The work is not an isolated object, but an object with flowers, plants, trees, water and so on".
  Sue Finlay, who undertook the majority of the planting and cultivation, describes the generosity of this creative process in her memoir The Planting of a Hillside Garden: “The learning process. The love involved in this process. That loving absorption  – the day-to-day tending of the poems. Their immediate surrounding areas, whether paved, grassy or covered with plants, always needed a lot of individual attention in the summer".
caption: "The present order is the disorder of the future (St Just)" inscribed at Little Sparta
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