Sanctuary presents the work of 10 international photo-artists exploring the enduring image of the garden.

Since the birth of photography, photographers have been drawn to horticulture and gardens for inspiration. Early photographic experiments utilized botanical specimens; the end of the C19th saw Pictorial Photographers emulating Victorian genre painting; and early C20th colour photographers delighted in the splendors offered by the herbaceous border. In recent years, however, photographers have looked to explore the garden’s cultural and social associations and meanings. The title of this exhibition is ironic. While the combination of forms and styles - including rare early C20th works - takes in a range of genre offering diverse perspectives collectively they interrogate the myth and
idealization of the garden as a safe haven - for individuals, (particularly women and children), wildlife, and even nature itself; as a controlled place - where wild nature is contained by (horti)culture; and as a utopian paradise - where horticultural and social perfection is exalted.

Emma Barton – from the photographer who launched the Kodak Girl, rare, early twentieth century autochromes and prints depict the garden as domestic haven, where children are lost in a fantasy.

In Gina Glover’s two companion works (a B/W photographic
circular installation, and wall mounted colour works), nostalgia
and fantasy mingle to explore conflicting memories of a Northamptonshire. garden.

Mark Edwards’ large scale colour photographs depict the ordinariness of a neglected garden where nature is reasserting
its authority, and finds an alternative pictorial beauty.

Anna Fox spies through the hedges of village gardens,
challenging the illusion of the secure garden haven.

Sian Bonnell’s photographic sculptures depict the garden as the stage for a surreal, carnivalesque reversal of natural order, in which household cleaning agents escape towards a life in Nature.

Neeta Madahar – following critical acclaim at 2004 Arles Photography Festival, three works from the Sustenance series, in which the daily drama of birdlife captured in surreal luminosity
from the artist’s balcony window.

Keith Arnatt – one of Britain’s longstanding conceptual artists, photographs every gardeners’ nightmare, dog shit on the perfect lawn, to both hilarious and disturbing effect.

Ian Skoyles’ composite jigsaw photograph - combining approximately three x 3,000 pieces, - contrives an horticulturally implausible cottage garden, in which flowers from different environmental zones and seasons are harmonized.

Using found sculpture, later photographed, Gérard Mermoz dipicts the never represented episode from ‘The Fall’, and invites us to carry the myth of Adam and Eve into new fictional directions.

Claudia Faéhrenkemper’s startling, magnified images of seeds appear as alien species waiting to drop on the unsuspecting garden; reminding the viewer of the fragile tension between tamed nature and the surrounding landscape.

With the exception of Emma Barton, all works are for sale.
Neeta Madahar, exhibited courtesy of Purdey Hicks Gallery, London,
Emma Barton, exhibited courtesy of Birmingham Central Library.

Gallery open
2-6pm Saturdays
2-6pm Sundays
or by appointment during exhibition dates.