Superbloom: The Making of “Garden Magic”
Dispatch from Overlap Gallery, Newport, RI
We are theatre kids. We discovered our shared Passion during one of several multi-hour road trips when one of us queued a musical theatre track. This love for theatricality, ensemble, and world-building brought our souls together in a special way, and is, in many ways, the heart of Garden Magic. The group show brought together thirteen artists and their garden-esque art. We were fascinated by the garden as an expansive symbol for many different things -- intimacy, vibrant matter, artifice, zones of ritual, sex and birth, wombs and portals, collaborating with god, nature, family, and communing with the non-human. The garden is a rhizome of possibility, where magic bounces between all things. It’s astonishing to create something and live in its meaning. That was our experience making Garden Magic. Traveling together to visit studios, spending the night at a few artists’ homes, installing for a week in coastal Newport, scrapbooking into the night, celebrating with a beautiful opening reception filled with so many beautiful people, and making individual trips to the gallery thereafter… this entire journey was a gardening process. It began with seeds of inspiration; over time, it grew, and as parts gathered, new possibilities bloomed through symbiotic encounters. The show lived, then was cleared. A circular experience. We are so grateful to the thirteen artists who offered parts of themselves -- artwork and otherwise. Together, we conjured real Garden Magic. LOVE FOREVER
- Maya/Kendall
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
My grandfather had an enormous vegetable garden that my brother and cousins and I would get lost in as kids. We ate lots of things from that garden in the summertime, and my grandfather would freeze the corn he had grown so we could have it as part of our Thanksgiving dinner.
Describe your favorite garden “thing.”
Really, texture and scent. Those are the things I love most.
Imagine your dream garden. What colors, textures, sounds, and smells come to mind?
All I know is that it smells like lilies and rain.
What season do you feel your creative practice is in?
Spring. It's always spring.
Lynne Harlow, Lodestar, 2022. Cast lead crystal.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
We lost our childhood home in the 2009 housing crisis. In 2012 my mom asked me to break into our old backyard to take back something she felt was rightfully hers (but hadn't managed to bring with her in our rushed move)- her perennial hostas she had been raising for decades. One day, midday, we broke into the backyard of our old house and began digging up dozens of plants that she wanted back. The new house residents arrived while we were digging. From afar I saw them pull into their driveway, notice an open gate, call the police, and leave again. I yelled at my mom we had to get going- we finished what we were digging and scurried away not getting caught.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
A concrete frog on its back.
Imagine your dream garden. What colors, textures, sounds, and smells come to mind? If your garden had a magic portal, what would it be like?
Green. It would be mostly green, like my mom's gardens. The magic portal would be a trampoline.
Madison Donnelly, Slide, 2019. Urethane resin.
Tell us a little about the cultivation of your practice, process, and materials.
Gardening is a hugely important aspect of my practice. On the perfect studio day, I spend half the day in my studio and half in the garden, switching back and forth every few hours. Both practices compliment and boost each other, especially since both pursuits ask for keen observation, daily practice, and patience.
Describe your favorite garden “thing.”
BUGS!!! They are complicated in a garden, as both pest and helpers, depending on the time of year, type of bug, and many other factors. I'm fascinated by their cycles and desires, not to mention their mysterious and beautiful bodies.
What season do you feel your creative practice is in?
Fall harvest, for sure :)
Gracelee Lawrence, Lack of Permanent Connection, 2021. Glass beads, stainless steel beads, stainless steel cable, hardware.
Gracelee Lawrence, When Language Fails (Rotating), 2022. 3D printed PLA plastic rotating platform.
Gracelee Lawrence, Without Need or Desire (Rotating), 2022. 3D printed PLA plastic rotating platform.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
I think Persian Gardens are the most beautiful kind of gardens. They incorporate the elements of sky, earth, water, and plants. In the buildings inside of these gardens, you see beautiful floral or geometric paintings on the walls and ceilings. I visited Fin garden in Iran in 2023, and loved seeing the architecture together with the real flowers and water features in the garden.
Tell us a little about the cultivation of your practice, process, and materials.
I work with handmade paper mache to make sculptures. Paper mache is historically and culturally significant to me as it was used in the history of Iran to make bookcases and artifacts such as pen boxes. The paper mache was then covered with floral paintings and lacquered and sealed. I take this tradition and bring it to a contemporary three-dimensional world. In this world I not only reimagine floral motifs but also queer bodies. My sculpture in this exhibition "Nightingale (Morgh e Sahar), 2023," is both abstract and representational with floral motifs and queer bodily presence. In Persian culture, the nightingale is a symbol of liberation. This work embodies a promise of freedom.
Book Cover, 19th century, Made in Iran. Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper; lacquer binding.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
I would be a small bird in the garden sitting on the branches under the shadow of the leaves above. I would sing to the flowers along with the wind and water streams.
Anahita Bagheri, Nightingale (Morghe Sahar), 2023. Papier-mache, metal, mesh, found chandelier.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
Relating to the series I have been working on, Mothers Gardens, I would say that the gardens of my mom in Toronto and grandma in the Philippines have been especially important to me as of late. Both of them have been sending me pictures of their gardens for the past 2 years through iMessage and Facebook Messenger respectively. This simple act of sending updates keeps us in contact—looking at their growing gardens, flowers blooming, vines climbing, fruits growing, and the seasonal cycles of plants dying and new ones being replanted each year.
Tell us a little about the cultivation of your practice, process, and materials.
My artistic process has always been collaborative to an extent, but especially now I have allowed my mom and grandma to direct the imagery of my work while I work on turning their images into paintings and sculptures. I really enjoy looking at and listening to the things and people around me!
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
I’ve heard fiddle leaf fig trees are really sensitive and high maintenance so I feel like I would be that plant lol
Miguel Caba, Mother’s Garden / Inang’s Garden, 2024. Acrylic on wood.
Miguel Caba, Veil, 2024. Acrylic on warped plywood.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
My grandma's garden was such an important part of my childhood. I remember picking blueberries with her in the evenings and baking blueberry pies.
Describe your favorite garden “thing.”
My favorite garden thing is a fountain. I love seeing the interactions a fountain has with the different kinds of life in a garden. It's a decorative and sometimes soothing thing for humans, a water source for animals and bugs, a place for algae and other imperceptible life to grow in and so on. Also, the cyclical nature of the water flowing through it reminds me of eternal life or something vaguely spiritual.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
If I was a garden thing, I would love to be a bench near an overgrown wildflower patch or under a tree.
Tatiana Sky, After-Death Communication, 2024. Fired ceramic, concrete, electric butterfly.
Tell us a little about the cultivation of your practice, process, and materials.
My practice is a combination of acute emotions, conversations with friends, specific memories, artistic & historical research, and the collecting of and caring for materials. My work has led me to forage in dumpsters, highways, farms, compost piles, apothecaries, free boxes, fabric stores, and florist shops.
Describe your favorite garden “thing.”
My favorite garden thing is my friend Addie's tea table in the heart of her cottage style garden. The table is a cross section of a large tree, and the ordered chaos of her teeming garden encloses around it in a comforting huddled way.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
I would love to be a bird bath. Completely open, reflecting the sky, watery.
Lydia Kern, Huddled Under the Large Place, 2023. Roses, embalming thread, rose dust, rest, wood.
Lydia Kern, Ghost Twin, 2023. Roses, bleeding hearts, double yolk egg shell from yundwell, farm, embalming thread, bells, mother’s ultrasound, daisy, vinyl fabric, resin, foxgloves from the Black Forest, wood, ink.
Tell us a little about the cultivation of your practice, process, and materials.
Sometimes I feel a texture and begin to try to make it from developing a material, process, or technique. The texture may be from a material, an image, or the way water moves. I begin to collect things that relate to this texture, often trying to source discarded or wasted materials. I want so badly to know how everything is made, and where the collected materials come from, so I try to find the source. The journey of searching for this source brings me to find things, experiences, and phenomena I never knew about. From all of this, that texture I was looking for tends to guide the work.
Imagine your dream garden. What colors, textures, sounds, and smells come to mind? If your garden had a magic portal, what would it be like?
There would be passion flowers, fig trees. bats, snakes, and frogs. The garden would have a river that flows into a huge swimmable pond full of lily pads and water hyacinths, but the pond responds to the moon, so there are tides. There there’s a portal where the river meets the pond that opens to an aquarium. From there you could scuba into an underground cave with kelp, oysters, and eels. But you may not be able to make it back to the pond from there depending on the moon cycle.
Sasha Fishman, Can’t Feel My Fingers, 2023. Reishi mycelium, firewood, rye, wood, mold, epoxy resin, fresnel lens, Priscilla (cryo). Mycelium material developed in collaboration with Lera Niemackl.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
My paternal grandmother's garden has always held a special place in my heart. My grandparents were farmers throughout their lives and even though farming was their source of income, my grandmother used gardening as her means of expression. She had a giant garden that surrounded their modest home in Pennsylvania with pathways and an assortment of plants. Fond memories for me include wandering the pathways and looking at rocks to find fossils.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
I would be a pansy. I really love working with the imagery of the pansy as a symbol within my work for its tether to queerness via reclamation of the slur pansy attributed to gay or effeminate men. My work deals with queer ecology at the heart of my influence and I feel so strongly that the pansy is a perfect symbol for this work.
What season do you feel your creative practice is in?
Spring has always been a powerful time for me in the studio. Even thinking back throughout school I had so many issues coming up with concepts in the autumn semesters, and I'm not fully certain why that would be, but it's rung true for a while. When I think back to the latest works I've created, many of them were conceived in spring. Not to sound cliche, but my work is about hope and adapting with the changing climate, and I think there's no more hopeful time than spring when it comes to seasons.
Brian Smith, Lightning Rod, 2023. Welded steel, foam, plaster, pigment, acrylic forms, fabric, oil pigment, wax.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
my childhood home was built on a swamp in florida and we had a pool that backed up to a tributary of the intercoastal waterway. our pool filter had a little watery compartment you could open up and look down into from above. it would catch crabs, frogs, spiky grass, lizards, etc., alongside the human trash, and i'd watch it all kind of dishragging around together in a slow whirlpool. then you could fish the animals out and walk them over to the creek, and they'd swim away. is this like a garden?? there's something in the random and alive compartmentalized collection that feels related.
Describe your favorite garden “thing.”
i love looking at a flower in the height of summer, any flower, it's like calling god on the phone. hello!!! but there's a person on my block who, in the little square of dirt on front of their house, put down gravel and wedged artificial flowers upright into the tiny rocks-- really like incredibly bright flowers from michael's or whatever, that stay there all year round, and personally i love seeing the fake daffodils and irises poking up through dead leaves, slush, snow. it gets me every time! i am eruptively, momentarily confused about what season it is and also reminded of the "hi god" quality of all flowers.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
i would want to be a worm. i think we, including me, don't understand how cool being a worm is. there's something scary about living underground that's preventing us from considering how expansive and immersive it would be.
Heather Leigh McPherson, The Magician (Am I That Name), 2022. Painting on paper in epoxy.
Heather Leigh McPherson, Laborer God, 2024. Drawing on paper, epoxy, acrylic, oil paint.
Share a memory of a special garden in your life that was important to you.
I've always lived in apartments so I didn't have too many gardens close to me but I thought about the community garden that Amanda Leigh Evans started at the Living School of Art in Portland, OR. I was a resident there and it was so incredible to see how the community at this apartment complex gathered, contributed, and celebrated its growth.
Describe your favorite garden “thing.”
I love the upward spiral things that allow vines like tomatoes to grow.
If you were a garden “thing,” what would you be?
I would be a bird bath or a wind chime, it's a hard pick
Tell us a little about the cultivation of your practice, process, and materials.
I feel like I'm a little pollinator and I go from flower to flower to harvest knowledge and references, and the flowers are vastly different sometimes, from different fields. I also feel like I gather materials, the way one would harvest. I make a bunch of drawings, animations, paintings, sculptures, and then I gather them all and I take them into the animation studio or I document them and bring them into Unity 3D and make them come alive.
What season do you feel your creative practice is in?
I think it pairs with the current seasons, so it's entering a fall state.
Imagine your dream garden. What colors, textures, sounds, and smells come to mind? If your garden had a magic portal, what would it be like?
Dream garden would have hydrangeas and there would be lots of wild flowers and fruit trees and garden beds for vegetables. I love hydrangeas so much because of their smaller parts and how fluffy they become when they're together. I would also say that my work has a hydrangea palette. I would love to smell herbs like rosemary and guascas, really woodsy. I would love to have a lounge chair where I could read and watch the birds (bird feeders everywhere) and butterflies and bees. The magic portal would be a butterfly-shaped fence, and the dream garden would have a miniature version of it, and when I open the miniature butterfly fence, I become tiny and get to experience the garden as a small creature and I get to hop on the birds and fly around.
Laura Camilla Medina, I am no longer fragmented, but I don’t feel like a singular version of myself, 2023. Paper mache, chiffon, dye, ceramic objects (made with Cecilia Vargas Muñoz), polymer clay, digital prints, wire, thread.