Open Eye Gallery has unveiled two exhibitions exploring our complex relationship with gardens, flowers and the natural world as part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2026.
Running until 31 August, Is This a Garden? and The Perfect Flower consider how gardens are shaped by social conditions, history, class and labour, while examining the cultural forces that influence how plants are classified, valued and perfected.
Is This a Garden?
Presented across Galleries 1 and 2, Is This a Garden? is curated by Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps. Rather than focusing on carefully designed gardens or conventional horticultural photography, the exhibition brings together images in which gardens appear incidentally, forming the backdrop to everyday life.
Gardens can be seen at the edges of photographs, behind their subjects, through windows and alongside industrial landscapes. In many of the featured works, the garden was never intended to be the photograph’s main subject.
Across the exhibition, gardens emerge through fragments and traces: birds moving through trees, fabricated scrubland, small “gardenettes” in synthetic towns, artificial flora and fauna generated using AI, cultivated land pressed against industrial environments, and domestic yards and patios.
Together, the works ask how gardens shape the people around them and, in turn, how social conditions, personal histories and local environments shape these spaces.
The exhibition includes work by Andrew Jackson, Julian Germain, Lydia Goldblatt, Andrew Lacon, Daniel Meadows, Sarah Pickering, John Goodwin, Mark Power, Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James, Ellie Stephens, Jamie Hawksworth, Sian Davey and Sabrina Tirvengadum.
Bratchford and Whipps said: “What interested us was not photographs of gardens so much as photographs where gardens are present in the background of everyday life.
“Bringing these works together has allowed us to think about gardens as social spaces shaped by history, class, labour and personal experience, and we hope audiences find new ways of looking at these often-overlooked environments.”
Is This a Garden? also revisits works from the Open Eye Gallery Archive, including photography from the gallery’s 1984 exhibition, Parks and Gardens.
This archival selection explores allotments, the relationship between people and plants, and the social practice of giving flowers. Featured artists include Paul O’Donnell, Vanley Burke, John Edwards, Neil McDowall, William Curwen, Caroline Penn, Anne Lloyd-Morris, John Greenwood, Martin Roberts, David Reed, Paul Fazackerley and Stephen McCoy.
The exhibition has been developed in partnership with the Centre for Research in Art and Design at Birmingham City University.
The Perfect Flower
In Gallery 3, Yan Wang Preston’s The Perfect Flower charts the development of hydrangeas in the UK through photography, projection and a short film.
The project begins with a reproduction of Britain’s oldest hydrangea specimen and was developed through Preston’s close observation of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Hydrangea paniculata trials.
Her work considers how flowers are classified, assessed and gradually shaped into an idealised form. It also examines the cultural and historical forces embedded within horticulture, including the colonial histories that influenced the introduction and commercialisation of plants in Britain.
“What is a perfect flower? How do we go about getting them? Why such an impulse?” Preston asks through the project.
The Perfect Flower forms part of the OFFSHOOT Artist in Residence programme, a collaboration between the University of Salford Art Collection, RHS Garden Bridgewater and Open Eye Gallery. The programme is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Is This a Garden? and The Perfect Flower are open at Open Eye Gallery until 31 August 2026 as part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2026. Admission is free.
For more information visit openeye.org.uk.
