Sophie von Maltzan is a German and Irish landscape architect, gardener, painter and sculptor, academic and environmentalist, known for her work in collaborative projects to create green spaces in urban settings, primarily in Ireland, including the development of a number of "pocket parks" or community gardens. Several of her garden designs have won national medals in Ireland, and she was profiled in a book on German gardeners, while one of her community garden projects was the topic of a chapter in a book on the concept of arts and "placemaking". She has also exhibited in Irish national sculptural shows.
Early life and education
Sophie Elisabeth Charlotte Gräfin von Maltzan was born in Berlin to a primary branch of the aristocratic Maltzan family. She trained as an artist at the Charles H. Cecil Studios, and as a gardener at the Galabau, Hamburg, and pursued undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). During her time with the ECA, she spent a year at France's National Institute for Horticulture and Landscape Management, at Versailles. She completed an honours master's degree in Landscape Architecture at ECA in 2003, with a dissertation entitled "Can landscape architecture play a role as a marketing communications tool to develop or maintain positive brand association? (Landscape the ambushed model? / The funding of landscape architecture by advertising.)".
Career
Von Maltzan began her career as an artist in the early 2000s, exhibiting self-portraits in Edinburgh, then, having moved to Ireland around 2004, exhibiting a selection of paintings at the IFSC in Dublin in 2007. She also produced large-scale watercolour paintings, many of landscapes she had observed, stored in folding "leporello" forms, with lengths of 1.5 to 5.5 or more metres. She had a studio at the home of Kieran and Vivienne Guinness, with some pictures selling to members of the Guinness family. Later her studio was located at her apartment on Mountjoy Square East, under the flat which was a primary location for the musical film Once (2007). She is a member of Visual Artists Ireland.
von Maltzan also produces works of sculpture and in 2011, she was accepted to display a piece at the annual Irish national sculpture exhibition Sculpture in Context; she was also accepted, with the piece Finglas Boys, for the 2015 edition of Sculpture in Context.
She worked as a landscape architect for landscape architecture firm Mitchell+Associates, and later founded her own practice, Fieldwork and Strategies. Von Maltzan has also worked as a lecturer, and tutor, in Landscape Architecture at University College Dublin, since at least 2010. Her students have been involved in a number of her projects, with assignments off-campus and in the community. She has also taught a module on environmental art to trainee primary school teachers.
Designs and projects
Garden design
Between 2009 and 2011, four of Von Maltzan's garden designs were included in the Bloom national garden festival in Dublin, with three winning medals. In 2010 and 2011, she managed a project to study potential reuse of the spaces left in Ballymun after the high tower blocks were removed, involving her UCD students and local schoolchildren. In 2012, she set up a project to produce garden areas for three inner city schools in Dublin, later the subject of an exhibition at DARC Space on North Great George's Street.
Pocket parks and community green spaces
In 2012 she launched the Smithfield Art Tunnel, a community garden and display space for art, developed with the local community and fellow artists, which operated for around two years. The project was the subject of a chapter in Cara Courage's academic text, Arts in place : the arts, the urban and social practice. She also led the Mary's Abbey Pocket Park project, at a corner of Arran Street East, which ran from 2014 to 2017, and was designer and project manager for the community-led St. Anne's Road Pocket Park in Drumcondra (2016-), a project with which she continued to be involved as of 2022. In 2017 she worked on plans for improved play facilities on York Street in central Dublin. In 2020, she was appointed as one of three artists under a community arts project of Dublin City University, and worked with public input and local schoolchildren to form a "micro pocket park" in the grounds of the former All Hallows College.