PHOTOGRAPHY Siân Davey
WORDS Millen Brown-Ewens
Photographer Siân Davey was piloting a family deep in the throes of the pandemic when her son Luke proposed that they transform an unattended patch of land outside her rented cottage in Devon into a wildflower sanctuary welcome to all. It was midwinter and, like most of the population, Davey and her family were spending most of their time at home. “Why don’t we turn it into something so beautiful that people just want to be photographed by you in it,” the photographer recalls him saying. Without particular ambition, Davey gave a resounding “yes”.
It took three months to clear the plot and hours of intensive research, but the pair threw themselves into the act, cultivating a space grounded in love. Whilst they worked, Davey collected stories from the people who walked by the low garden wall, sowing the seeds of their confessions into the soil. A year later, when the flowers blossomed, they beckoned a host of visitors to their beds – from mothers and daughters to friends, lovers, and lonely souls – eager to shed inhibitions, anxieties and even clothes. As wildflowers silently burgeoned from its every corner – poppies, mullein, meadowsweet, and giant sunflowers dashing vibrant hues against the lush green canvas – Davey took up her camera and began shooting. The resulting body of work, a three-year photographic project titled The Garden, commemorates the reconciliation of individuals with nature and one another amidst a period of collective crisis.
A young couple, on their way to swim in the nearby river, pause to be pictured in a supine embrace, strips of sunlight kissing their bare skin. Seated in a dusty pink armchair, a young girl in pigtails looks beyond the frame, her floral dress appearing as though sewn into the rich tapestry of life surrounding her. The effects of abundant natural beauty can be read in the gaze of every one of Davey’s subjects; at once vulnerable yet peaceful and resolute.
The success of The Garden both as a physical space and photographic project is a testament to Davey’s commitment to finding connection through intimate storytelling. Her first photobook Looking for Alice (2015) illustrated her family life through portraits of her daughter Alice, who was born with Down’s syndrome, while her second Martha (2018) celebrated her teenage daughter’s navigation of the rocky trials of adolescence.
In her latest series, Davey transcends the specificity of portraiture to share a more universal narrative about togetherness. Compassionately lensed, she records the evolution of her garden as an expression of joy, interconnectedness, tenderness, and deviance. A site of not only environmental conservation but of emotional conservation too, she renders the human body as inherently natural, enfolded in the dense meadow, sharing in its vulnerabilities and evolution.
With The Garden on exhibit in Soho Photography Quarter until November and a photo book of the series anticipated for publication this Spring, we took some time out with Davey to reflect.
So Siân, The Garden arose from an atmosphere of heightened anxiety and isolation. Do you feel this affected people’s engagement with it?
When I first began working on the project, the anxiety was palpable. It was post-lockdown and people were cautious around all contact. Our garden is on the corner of a busy footpath on the Dartington Hall Estate that takes dog walkers and families down to the river and local school. Our 2.5 ft high garden wall started to feel like a meeting point: a place where passers-by would stop and share their stories. It increasingly felt like a confessional space at a time when people were made to confront themselves in ways they had not before.
Before launching your photography career, you worked as a psychotherapist for 15 years. How did you draw on this experience for this project?
My background in psychotherapy informs everything I do. I underwent years of personal psychotherapy and really got to know myself during that process. I learnt to face some fears and bring myself into a deep sense of connection internally. Essentially, I learnt to love again in a meaningful, healthy way. Working with my clients was an extension of this. I learnt what it means to be human, that we are more the same than we can ever imagine and are bound by our shared longing for love and community. We have learnt to adapt along the way, to mask our fears and vulnerabilities yet learning that we are worthy of love just as we are, is one of the most liberating lessons a person can go through.
Many of your visitors are photographed unclothed, was this a preconceived creative decision?
From the onset, I didn’t imagine anything or have any preconceptions about the portraits, apart from not getting in the way of people expressing who they were. What we could never have imagined was how people responded to the garden once the flowers started to explode. We built immersive structures laden with gourds and climbing plants. Apart from a small pathway and a grassy enclosure, the garden was only flowers. You could see how moved people were when they came into the garden. They softened and became very still. There was a feeling of opening, of acceptance, of reconnection. People wanted to express and experience themselves in ways they had not before. For some, it meant abandoning their clothes and being seen. The very first photograph in the series was two women who asked me if I’d photograph them. They had recently become lovers and wanted to take off their clothes for the shoot. This somehow went on and even though the path that ran alongside the garden was at times busy, no one seemed to care.
Elsewhere you’ve described the garden as a metaphor for the human heart itself. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
The Garden is a story about love and what gets in the way of love. When there is only love there is no need to hide. From the very first days of its design, The Garden was a place where people could experience themselves without judgement or separation.
It felt like the garden was a microcosm of the world, from the disenfranchised to the teenagers struggling with drugs and psychosis, the heartbroken, and the people in the final days of their lives.
Yes, it’s evident from the photographs that this is an inclusive space. Without revealing anything sacred, can you share why certain visitors were compelled to enter the garden?
It felt like the people who came were meant to come, as though they were on a pilgrimage. Everyone had a story, and it was always moving, extraordinary, and often unexpected. It felt like the garden was a microcosm of the world, from the disenfranchised to the teenagers struggling with drugs and psychosis, the heartbroken, and the people in the final days of their lives. The garden is about non-duality. We’re in this together and not separate from one another. A woman asked me if she could be photographed holding her daughter who has Retts Syndrome and is profoundly disabled. She wanted to experience her child beyond the physical practicalities of their relationship, and to experience her daughter’s naked body in her arms and to feel the tenderness of that moment. I photographed a man in his thirties who had suffered neglect as a child and had never witnessed himself in a family photo album. It meant so much to him taking part in the making of this work, seeing himself in a picture and finding a community for the first time.
Can you tell me about the practicalities of cultivating this garden?
From the moment my son suggested the idea, we committed. The practicalities we worked out along the way. Everything we did was an expression of love, a devotional act. My son Luke and I obsessively shared our dreams and ideas every morning over breakfast. Tirelessly, we cleared the garden throughout the freezing winter. We researched like crazy how to grow a garden organically and sow bio-dynamically under the moon cycles.
The structures in the garden were made by dragging up branches from the riverbed and coppicing hazel from the woods. Luke planted anarchically. He crammed seeds and plants into every corner so that when they blossomed there was no order to it. This created a beautiful chaos. We prioritised the pollinators. We let the garden go wild. In the second year, we worked out that because the garden was so small, we had to create different visual narratives with flowers to not replicate the pictures, this meant building new structures and changing the height and the planting. Ultimately, The Garden was a living studio and despite attempts to influence the process, each year it showed us that nature has greater intelligence than we do.
The Garden is our natural state. The dissonance we are experiencing, because of the dominance of conflict, technology, and our collective anxieties is a turning away from nature, ourselves, each other, and, ultimately, love.
The project embodies this lush confluence of humanity and nature. What did you anticipate visitors would take from the garden?
Our estrangement from nature is a separation from ourselves. The pandemic showed us that nature draws us in to help us reconnect with ourselves. The Garden is our natural state. The dissonance we are experiencing, because of the dominance of conflict, technology, and our collective anxieties is a turning away from nature, ourselves, each other, and, ultimately, love. What I wish people to take away from the garden more than anything else is to love one another…
You finished shooting for the series last September. Why did you decide to draw it to an end?
The series only exists to communicate something specific in a particular window of time that reflects where humanity is, as all art does. After three years of making the work, through constantly photographing, writing, and filming, the meaning of this work was revealed to us, and it was time to bring it to a close.
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