"Night Gardens" collages

 Gardens are like poems: transformations and exchanges between self and the surrounding world. They begin with an intimate touch of hand to earth—as fingers sift soil, bury seeds and tubers, clear some vegetation to let more breathe. Small acts of attention and care tether the gardener to rhythms of exchange, giving in, and receiving. To plant, to nourish, to gather, and prune is to engage with the vast will and system of the universe. Observing slow growth, listening, and responding to the garden’s requests, the tender becomes attuned to its needs.

 

Often a space for contemplation, gardens invite surrender to the earth’s autonomy, where the urge to control fades. Attempts to domesticate are met with the earth’s own will. Like Priapus, the ancient symbol of boundless life and growth, the spirit of the garden flourishes. Untended, a garden reclaims its place as wilderness. Gardens provide food, medicine, fragrances, and textures—flowers, mulch, compost—alongside the rich colors and stirring life within them. Birds, insects, and hidden movements remind us that a garden is always a world unto itself.

 

In myths, lotuses and water lilies rise from waters like Re, the Egyptian sun god. The annual flooding of the Nile echoes this, as waters recede to reveal fertile soil where the lotus blooms. The resilient thistle, both cursed and cherished, embodies fortitude, even dispelling melancholy through its roots. Each plant carries its own history, symbolism, and mystery, appearing in these collages as emblems of adaptation.

 

In Night Gardens, I explore gardens through the lens of underwater life and flooding riparian zones, imagining how plants might migrate, mutate, and adapt in a rapidly changing climate. The photographs, layered and collaged with fish tanks, mirrors, digital techniques, and cut-outs, blend elements of myth and nature, creating an interplay between randomness and cultivation.

 

In folklore, a will-o'-the-wisp (or ignis fatuus, meaning "foolish flame" in Latin) is a ghostly light seen by travelers at night, often appearing over bogs, swamps, or marshes.

 

 

Night Gardens will open at Robert Mann Gallery on December 12, 2024.