Part of what makes the Garden distinctive is the revelation of the process of fabricating and installing the work, and this may require weeks of preparation in the park by an artist. For example, in October 1985, Andreas Gehr's piece took eight hundred hours of on-site construction to build. Artists have discovered that members of the public stop to ask questions, make comments or observe the art-making process. Because the exhibits are mounted for either two, four or six month periods, the site can be visited many times and the work can be experienced in daylight and nighttime and as the seasons change.

Although the majority of artists who have exhibited in the Toronto Sculpture Garden live and work in Ontario, the Art Advisory Board is not restricted to selecting artists from within the province. To date, several artists from Russia, England and the United States have produced work for the Garden, as well as five artists from Quebec and three from British Columbia.

Artists have made site-specific or site-sensitive work that reflects the Garden's location in the city opposite a cathedral, adjacent to a restaurant and near a thriving market and residential area. They have responded to its place in the history of the development of the city and its location in the heart of a commercial and business district and have commented on its reality as a man-made piece of nature surrounded by buildings. The chronology in this book reflects artists' increasing sensitivity to site and context and parallels current practices in contemporary art. The following essay by Barbara Fischer examines the development of the aesthetic and the practice of making sculpture within this century, while the text by Ihor Holubizky positions the Garden within the local scene and the context of public art in Toronto since 1967.