Feature: Siân Davey’s Secret Garden by Jessica Shearer, July 1, 2024
One can’t help, when thinking of gardens, to think of the garden. Eden has haunted Western cultures for millennia, representing both what we have lost and the promise of what we might again attain if we behave. The story also lays the groundwork for some of our most frustratingly pervasive stereotypes about women: that they are sly and grasping, that they will – wittingly or not – enter into cahoots with evil and lead you astray.
How interesting, then, to imagine what could happen when a woman – rather than getting you forcibly ejected from a garden – invites you into one. What might you find? How would you behave? With her new book, The Garden, released earlier this spring by Trolley Books, UK-based photographer Siân Davey provides some answers to those questions. In 80 color portraits, Davey has brought her Eden quite literally down to earth: she keeps her compositions low and close – there’s little to no sky in the vast majority of the shots – documenting an exuberant, untamed, wholly terrestrial sanctuary where her subjects are free to experiment and play. (A selection of the work will be on view at Michael Hoppen Gallery when the group show Outside Inside opens July 15; the gallery will also show the work in Tokyo, at Studio 35 Minutes, beginning August 15.)
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Perhaps my favorite portraits follow Davey’s neighbor, who entered the garden wearing – for the first time – women’s clothing. In a blonde wig, slinky pink dress, and matching heels, she skims her hand over the wispy heads of blue and yellow blossoms in one photograph; in another she’s seated on the ground, laughing and tucking her feet demurely beneath her. In yet another she’s lying quiet under a tangle of blooms, the light glinting off of her crystal necklace. She is holding herself in her own arms, and she is beautiful.
To close the book’s introduction, Davey writes, “I am the garden. Those who enter are the garden. Without distinction, without separation.” This collapse into connection is what makes this project so special. Here, the garden does not erase that which gives you shame, but instead asks you to embrace it. You, Davey seems to say, are as beautiful as this flower. And that is more than enough.
photograph / Volume 19, Number 6
July–August 2024
photograph magazine
Publication / International
