Kim Adams makes the 'last Canadian landscape sculpture'

Walking up to the west Toronto address I'd punched in my phone, there is no doubt: this must be the place. On a warm afternoon in late September, Kim Adams has the doors of his backyard studio rolled open and I find the silver-haired artist primping some greenery on a mountain that's slowly overtaken his workspace.  

The boulder is humongous — roughly eight feet tall and seven feet wide. It's made of Faux Rock, a landscaping product used to conceal utility equipment. (It's the biggest the company makes, the sculptor says.) Renowned for his assemblages using consumer goods, Adams has transformed the artificial stone into a mighty peak. It's lush with miniature trees, shrubs and grasses and inhabited by thousands of 1:87 (or "HO scale" in the language of model railroaders) figures of people and animals, including a disconcerting number of pigs. 

The artist first told me about the project years ago, during an interview about the Bruegel-Bosch Bus. Permanently installed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the bus is a heaving city built on the bones of a 1959 Volkswagen pickup truck. At the time, he'd told me that the ongoing installation, which he adds to each year, was his "retirement project" — an impossibly large undertaking to keep him busy into his twilight. "But," he confided in a hush-hush manner, "I have another one."

Towering above us in the studio, now "99 per cent finished," Arrived (formerly known as Pig Mountain) is that other one. A decade in the making and kept mostly under wraps, the 72-year-old artist will exhibit the long-simmering, large-scale work at Art Toronto this weekend. The occasion will be followed by a show of smaller related works at Toronto's Hunt Gallery, opening next week.

The mountain began as a vision of paradise, Adams says. Whereas the bus is often viewed as an industrial hellscape (largely because the artist hasn't yet added the nature he's envisioned for it), he conceived of the mountain as its green, utopic counterpart. Although he resists the Biblical interpretation, at first, there were just two people living on the rock — both gardeners. He approached its landscaping like a Pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, using tweezerfuls of pink grass, wildflower and evergreen like brushstrokes. It was beautiful, but it wasn't quite right, he says. "Too flat." So he began building out nooks and ridges with cork bark.

Soon, more people arrived — vacationing urbanites in Adams' mind — and the artist's trademark train-cars-turned-housing began to appear. He exhibited the piece as a work-in-progress at the 2016 Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine in Trois-Rivières, Que. But outside his studio, he was shocked how bare and incomplete the work looked. He knew it had to grow so much more.

That's when his brain "clicked over," Adams says, and he began projecting himself into the tiny sections he was working on for weeks at a time, creating places he'd like to visit. True to life, just as one setting became a pleasant hangout, people flocked to it. Animals, too, made homes there. And with this boom of life, scenes started to emerge. He points out some bears who've chased a man up a tree, a love story unfolding on a tire swing and a walkway that nods to an artwork by his mentor Mowry Baden. Naturally, the narratives themselves began to multiply: an animal sanctuary, a mermaid grotto, a team of triplet groundskeepers, a nude beach, a boat chase.  

And then, there are the pigs. There are hundreds if not thousands of feral swine on the sculpture formerly known as "Pig Mountain." They're coming out of the ground like ants. Once he started inserting the miniature ungulates, Adams went through his stock like jellybeans — "an orange one, a yellow one," he says, making a plucking gesture.

"I wanted to make a beautiful landscape, but it just kept on telling me it needs more."

Today, far from the unspoiled Eden of its beginnings, the mountain has reached a breaking point. "There are too many people," Adams says. "There are too many pigs." Paradise has been overrun and the island mountain's ecosystem has been pushed to the brink. "It's sort of like the whole process of what humans do, and I ended up doing the same thing: I f--ked it up," the artist says. "The beauty is still there. But the problem is equivalent to the beauty."

He calls the artwork "the last Canadian landscape sculpture." Last, he says, because "the pigs will eat everything, so there won't be a landscape left." Referencing the rise of invasive feral swine that are causing ecological damage across North America, Adams' pigs are a stand-in for overconsumption writ large. Among the forces reshaping the mountain — gardeners, tourists and pigs — Arrived seems to suggest that we are all three. 

The artist sees the work as a response to the tradition of Canadian landscape art. In fact, he'd like to see the sculpture go live somewhere it can be shown next to the genre's great practitioners: Carr, Milne, the Group, he lists. It serves as a present-day counterpoint to their famously unpeopled Romantic vision of the land. 

With Pig Mountain all but scaled — and his semi-secret retirement project exhausted — what hill does the artist climb next? "You turn 65 and [the opportunities] get a little thin," he says. The mountain allowed him to continue to be an artist. 

"But I have another one," Adams tells me once more. I get the impression there might always be another one — an unfathomably large project ready to overtake his studio. "You have to keep at it, because what else do you do? I mean, gardening is great but … I have another piece in mind."

He's mum on details except that it will be something that can grow even more wild