THE NIGHT GARDEN, 2024 – 2025
Over several decades living in the same spot, my garden in coastal Suffolk has been a repeated subject in my work; weaving together my deep interest in time, transience, memory, histories and landscape. Although a familiar plot, its’ relentless evolutions & cycles can be strange, mysterious & disconcerting; starkly so at night. In 2024 I began a series of moonlit night garden works, that has developed into an ongoing exploration, revealing how much there still is to learn about this single piece of land.
My studio forms the upper floor of an outbuilding with a long stretch of windows that look out & down, mimicing a bird hide. It stares into the garden below, & beyond to a sweep of low lying reed beds so characteristic of the region.
By day, I can scrutinise this ever changing view, its scents, sounds & wildlife including rooks, kites, buzzards, the occasional marsh harrier, barn owls that breed within the patch and on a really good day even ravens.
By night, there are always the bats – drawn by the studio lights, the animated owls catching their prey, a winter vixen’s blood curdling cry and resident mice scampering within the studio roof space above keeping me alert.
In bright moonlight & studio lights off, the garden becomes a dazzling theatre with mine a front row seat. Shapes morph, land and sky meld, differences dissolve to become ethereal, absorbing, reinvented.