About Topiary Garden
A painting normally stays flat. Columbus has one that escaped into a seven-acre park.
The Topiary Garden recreates Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte using living plants. Fifty-four life-sized topiary figures occupy the landscape along with sculpted animals, boats, and other forms arranged around a pond.
Artist James T. Mason developed and sculpted the topiary figures with Elaine Mason beginning in the 1980s. Instead of copying the painting onto another surface, the project translates its composition into three-dimensional space. Visitors can walk between figures that occupy the positions of people who originally existed only as points of paint.
The garden is maintained within a public Columbus park and changes naturally with season and plant growth. Visitors can explore the landscape year-round, although conditions and individual plant forms vary. It is a rare artwork where the correct viewing method is to step directly into the scene.