The Escarpment 2022

Set into the central, primary peristyle of The Illawarra Pavilion, The Escarpment Moving-Water Bowlscape brings into the mind’s eye the cloistered yet delightful domestic garden setting common to both the Chinese Courtyard home to the Hortus Conclusus of the ancient Roman Domus, The Escarpment is a cultural relocation and reenactment fantastique of the wider Illawarra Escarpment landscape into a Moving-Water Bowlscape or Dòngshuǐ Pénjǐng (动水盆景), complete with the dynamic allure of the waterfall, aquatic flora and fauna. The originating loci of the Moving-Water Bowlscape is in the ancient Chinese art of Pénjǐng (盆景) which, along with its close Japanese cousins Bonsai (盆栽) and Saikei (栽景), sought to depict if not enact artistically formed trees, other plants, and/or landscapes in miniature.

Emerging as a formalised art form in China during the height of the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 C.E.), the Pénjǐng today can be further classified into three main categories: Shùmù Pénjǐng (树木盆景) which focusses on the aesthetics of a single or collection of miniaturised trees in a pot; Shānshuǐ Pénjǐng (山水盆景) which is a deliberate composition of select rocks in contact with water and completed with small live plants to depict a miniature landscape, and finally, Shuǐhàn Pénjǐng (水旱盆景) which effectively combines the practices of the two aforementioned categories. The Escarpment Moving-Water Bowlscape thus inhabits the locus of the Shānshuǐ Pénjǐng, albeit with a much deeper water setting; powered by with the modern electric water pump and augmented with a built-in water(fall) filtration system - hence the prefix Moving-Water (动水), to allow fishes and other aquatic life forms to safely and happily inhabit the Bowlscape.