The Secret Garden Exhibition

One night, feeling a little empty about the lack of room for creativity in my life, I decided to walk out my front door and take a photo of the scrub, this photo brought back my spark and was the start of The Secret Garden. After being overseas I came home so inspired by the incredible places I had seen and people I had met, we often get so excited by the new and exotic, that we forget to appreciate the beauty at our front door step. The Secret Garden aims to answer a question I was once asked, “if you could take one photograph what would you want it to look like?” My answer was, “The Secret Garden”. This series recalls my childhood fascinations with my natural surrounds. In order to convey this vision, I am forcing myself to only photograph in my garden, breaking down the familiarity veil and re-inciting my imagination within my everyday surrounds.

My work is concerned with what lies in the peripheral vision of the everyday, observing the beauty and intrigue of the multi- faceted environment that surrounds us. I draw inspiration by the combination of nature and the lens, exposing the wonder within nature. This fascination with shifts in perspectives, explains my attachment to the mediums of photography and video. Both mediums are used to represent reality yet simultaneously have the ability to undermine this visual ‘reality’ by using in-camera techniques and minimal post-production. It’s all about appreciating the very real environment we live in and the magic of the optical instrument at capturing these elements in a unique but very real way.

This exhibition has largely been inspired by my fond childhood memories of the hours I spent in the garden and my father reading my sister and I The Secret Garden novel.

Exhibition travelling, please get in touch if you are interested in having this work in your gallery space.