A Rose is a Rose is a Rose at Hestercombe Gallery

Five artists - Brendan Barry, Feral Practice, John Newling, Sophy Rickett and Marjolaine Ryley - present new works exploring art and sustainability in the face of the climate emergency and declining biodiversity.

This exhibition brings together new projects by five artists that engage with gardens and landscapes as sites for practice and enquiry, addressing questions of meaning and ethics, community and collaboration and exploring art and sustainability in the face of climate emergency and declining biodiversity. Across a diverse range of media but with a shared interest in process and materiality, the five artists will all be presenting new work made after visits to Hestercombe and discussions with curators and gardeners.

Engaging with current debates about the generative possibility of plants and our engagement and communication with other species, the exhibition asks questions about the ethics and sustainability of an artistic engagement with the natural world, and about how we might represent our place in it. With a nod to Gertrude Jekyll’s description of her own garden as ‘my study, my workshop, my place of rest’, the exhibition will evolve and grow over the summer as each artist creates new work and/or carries out participatory workshops in response to Hestercombe.

Photographer, educator and camera builder Brendan Barry, transforms the gallery overlooking Hestercombe’s Formal Garden into a giant camera obscura, using the mechanics of analogue photography as a tool for exploration and collaboration.