Why Gardens?

Hi, my name is Inês, I’m not a writer, I’m an Artist… but for the foreseeable I’m also taking up writing, journaling, blogging, whatever you want to call it, alongside my practice.

A few weeks ago, I found out that I was awarded the funded Hugo Burge Foundation Botanical Art Residency at Marchmont House – a bit of a mouthful I know – and for those not in the art world… it’s a big deal. I am housed, for free, given a much larger studio, for free, and even given a stipend to help the day-to-day costs. I am being given the rather intimidating but exciting opportunity to just work on my art, for a whole month.  

It’s incredibly difficult to get the time and resources to pursue art, the image of the struggling artist always comes to mind. Those that sacrifice everything for their art, no part time job, scratch that, no two maybe three part time jobs, just them, whatever space they’ve managed to find to work in and their practice. This is not me. I kind of wish it was but it’s not.

I wear three hats, Artist, Information Assistant at a Gallery and Founder and Director of Community Interest Company called the Art and Nature Collective. Some question doing all this… “spread too thin”, “not dedicated enough”, “unfocused”, are just a few things I’ve been called. I disagree. Although my days “off” don’t exist, only one of my jobs actually pays me a regular wage, and I sometimes daydream about a 9-5, all three jobs are incredibly important, three prongs of the same proverbial fork if you will.

And now, as if I didn’t give myself enough work, a written element! This may succeed, it may not, but the series of blog posts to come are my way of bringing all these together, for it to “make sense” to the nay sayers as well as it being an important self-reflection process and a way for me to bring together my social research. These will be informal, but I’ll weave in – hopefully – bits of theory as my research develops.  

My research, I haven’t mentioned that yet have I? Well, I went back to university after my art degree (glorified studio space) to study social anthropology, as I realised a huge part of my art is based on social research. I love learning about people, why they do things, their customs and histories, the stories they tell, their monsters and fairytales, and how they differ from the white western upbringing I had. I have travelled widely, staying with remote tribes in Malaysian Borneo, working in schools in Africa, learning from communities in Peru and so much more. What has always struck me, wherever I’ve gone, is people’s relationships to the environment. Something that has never been as important as it is now… and what is in stark contrast? How distant western lives, particularly the UK, have been separated from an inseparable thing – nature.

Over the next few months I will be undergoing ethnographic research visiting gardens around the UK, specifically walled gardens, to understand their history, and how they are used today. This research is closer to home, literally, as I’ll reflect on the gardens I grew up in. But why gardens? Gardens have been pivotal throughout religion, literature and colonialism, they are symbols of power and wealth, they open important discussions on native and non-native be that flora, fauna or even human, they are spaces of back breaking labour but also of leisure, they play with notions of boundaries and borderlands, some are private, others open to the public, and some are community run, some people have them, some don’t, and they are now invaluable spaces for naturing (not-rewilding – more on this later), but ultimately they’re our first experience of ‘nature’.

Whether you realise it or not, you are shaped by the green spaces you grow up in, and, well, why not… Gardens.

My Granny (Sally), and my partner Rob in her Garden