Garden Bindings

2025

A series produced in response to the way in which we relate to nature during times of unrest, examining the way in which we used nature to escape the period between the two world wars and assessing how this feels relevant in today’s climate. I have been specifically focusing on the ‘Galapagos Affair’, which began in 1929 when a couple fled post-war Germany for an uninhabited island on the other side of the world in attempt to establish their own Eden. Their escapades quickly garnered international press attention, and others followed, moving to the island. Violent territorialism and power struggles soon broke out, leading to several mysterious disappearances and deaths, the new community like an intensified microcosm of the society they had all been trying to escape back home.

 

The resultant paintings explore the idea of there being some inherent entitlement ingrained within Europeans and how that rubs up against this period of fall of empire. I’ve been experimenting with depicting plants that naturally want to grow wild and free and finding ways to constrict them, both in the physical forms that we bind them to in real life to control the way they grow, and in the way in which I’m using paint to present them.

 

Paintings from this series have so far been shown with Tube Culture Hall (Milan), Twilight Contemporary (London), and Tache Gallery in collaboration with Minor Attractions (London).

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