Category: Exhibitions and Events in York

'Right here, right now. It's historical, big, huge and beautiful' 

looks at the community in the environment of a walled garden which is run by Brunswick – a place that provides a work-like environment for adults with learning disabilities. The team cares for it year-round: creating wood-worked items, growing vegetables to sell in their own shop and developing the garden. They have been doing this for nearly twenty years.

My aim is to collaborate with the Brunswick community on how they are seen on their own terms without relying on the societal label that's placed upon them. I also want the audience to discover the walled garden and reflect on it as a place that can give people their own agency and autonomy.

I am examining themes of representation, community and visibility. Gardens have their own psychological effect, creating a place of sanctuary and growth on which individuals can base their own values.

The walled garden is a contradictory place. On the one hand, it is a place most people walk or drive past every day without knowing it is there. But it is also a place where people can thrive, be validated and be seen on their own terms. The project also speaks to how people in underserved communities can be hidden and not hidden simultaneously within society.

There are multiple traces of historical, natural and social layers to be discovered – vignettes of smaller environments within an already enclosed space on top of which sits the seasonal cycle of growth and renewal in cultivated and rewilded areas. Brunswick itself is only a small part of the story as the garden has existed in some form since the late 1700s.

It is the basis of the desire of any group of human beings to have a place of their own, a place which gives them reality, presence, power of living, which feeds them, body and soul. 

Paul Tillich (1995)