Harley Weir ‘The Garden’

The Garden brings together new and archival images that combine Harley Weir’s signature intensity and fluid approach to image-making with a melancholic but resolved nostalgia, a forceful, subversive energy, presenting the complexity, depth and charge of her arresting visual language.
The title of the exhibition is chosen for its universal symbolism: place of seed and growth, space of beginning and ending; garden as paradise, heterotopia, utopia, and in the contemporary context, reflecting the enduring human desire for action and imagination to converge towards a more sustainable, equitable future. For Weir, the garden is “the pinnacle and the pipe dream of where I’m going and what I want”.
The exhibition presents Weir’s reflections on the ideal versus real garden in personal terms. In the downstairs gallery she shows us in visual terms her reality of adulthood, and her own journey through womanhood, with looming questions and contradictions of mother/daughter, parent/child, clock and time, caring and being cared for, as well as her experience of the changing, aging body. Upstairs, she presents love at first sight, 28 new works memorialising adolescence and first experience, its excitement, anticipation and naivety. Using ancient paper making techniques she merges photos and objects collected over decades - dry flowers and butterfly wings, memorabilia from her teenage years, and letters written to friends, lovers and pen pals in the late 90s and early 2000s - embedding her personal archive within handmade paper sheets to create singular new works in soft, sugar pastel colours.