‘Silent Melodies’ of plants are music to the ears of Atlanta artist

It’s been five years since artist Eric Mack had a solo exhibition at his Inman Park gallery Whitespace. In that time he has turned 50, raised an adorable 7-year-old daughter, created numerous artworks on commission, taught workshops on the beauty and complexity of soil alongside scientists and geologists at Georgia Tech and also nurtured a rewarding side hustle: the Kai Garden.

Twice a month, Mack stages plant sale pop ups at his historic East Lake home which is also his greenhouse and sales floor.

Crowds flock to the sales, plant junkies jonesing for the kind of esoteric specimens Mack grows. He cultivates more than 300 plant varieties, unusual perennials you aren’t likely to find at a brand name nursery. A self-taught plantsman, he has an encyclopedic knowledge gleaned from reading and from binge watching the BBC show “Gardeners’ World” featuring the tousle-headed Brit Monty Don.

The Kai Garden, Eric Mack's home and business in East Lake. (Courtesy of Eric Mack)

Mack has a deep fascination with plants. And the more esoteric the better, as attested to by the gorgeous monkey puzzle tree he is nurturing in a pot on his front porch. Native to South America, these ancient conifers with cactuslike branches have been called living fossils and may have developed their spiky leaves to keep dinosaurs from eating them. The oldest, estimated at 1,800 years old, lives in Chile’s Conguillío National Park. But the trees don’t do well in Georgia clay. Mack struck out twice trying to grow monkey puzzle in the ground, so he’s reverted to nurturing his in a container where he can control the soil and nutrients.

With his curious nature and scientific love of studying and growing plants, it’s no wonder that Mack attracted the interest of Georgia Tech earth and atmospheric sciences assistant professor Shi Joyce Sim whose workshop series “Cosmic Missteps” blends scientific research and artistic experimentation.

Students in the “Cosmic Missteps” workshop use soil samples sourced from oceans all around the world by Georgia Tech geology professor Jennifer Glass and work with Mack to incorporate the soil into artworks. Like Glass, Mack is attuned to the hidden but potent properties of soil.

“A lot of people don’t realize that it’s not just minerals; it’s bacteria and fungi,” Glass said. “It’s teeming with life.”

Artist Eric Mack at work in his East Lake home. (Patrick Heagney)

Though Mack said he likes to keep his art and plant worlds separate, in his current Whitespace show “Silent Melodies,” open until June 6, those two obsessions — plant and paint — converge into one intriguing whole.

“His compositions demonstrate growth, decay, and renewal. Blooms, stems, seeds and branches become visual notes within a broader composition, producing what Mack describes as the garden’s annual symphony,” according to the gallery’s unusually poetic exhibition statement.

The 31 mixed-media pieces in “Silent Melodies” suggest scientific specimens splayed out under a microscope, hidden worlds buzzing with purpose.

But unlike his early works that looked like overviews of city grids or computer circuit boards and leaned hard into the digital and techie, Mack has gone full botanic in “Silent Melodies.”

Eric Mack's mixed media work "GRV-0708" on wood veneer with red sand, raintree leaves, tissue paper, acrylic paint. (Courtesy of Whitespace)

“PVR-3000” is an example of that nature-centric vibe.

The mixed media work is a complex palimpsest of the kind of layers you’d find in a garden: cocoon silk, miscanthus grass and rose mallow foliage, yarrow and northern sea oat seeds, sand and pine tree threads, all of which attest to the web-like networks of the natural world. He has arrested in these artworks the enchantment of the garden, the busy work of roots and replication, nature’s primordial forces and the generative power of plants.

Sitting on his cozy screened-in porch and surrounded by his nursery of plants on the hillside beyond, Mack talks about how attuned he has become as a gardener to the “silent melodies” he hears when he’s gardening. It’s the kind of unspoken communication that passes between a baby looking deep into its father’s eyes: one of the magical forces of love and understanding we don’t often reflect upon in our hyper rationale, facts-and-figures world.

Lavender cotton grows at the Kai Garden. (Courtesy of Eric Mack)

He began the Kai Garden in 2017 when he and his wife Malissa were mourning their stillborn son Kai. Mack turned to the garden and growing to cope with the loss. Like so many people who have found restorative power in nature — in forest bathing, in the contact high with soil and sunshine, in the cycles of life and death that can often inexplicably heal human loss — Mack found succor tending seedlings and watching them mature into plants.

“I was able to nurture plants and take care of them when I was ready to be a father and I couldn’t, yeah. So I could put my love and care and energy and focus into a living thing.”

Lenten rose growing in the Kai Garden. (Courtesy of Eric Mack)

It’s not for nothing that setups like Mack’s where he coaxes seeds into seedlings are called nurseries. There is something restorative about the act of raising and tending plants, something Mack did not get to experience with Kai.