Nang’s garden

Nang’s garden – selected works

For the last three years I have been tending a piece of land that survives only on paper. Through drawing, gardening and conversation, I make work that sits between memory and possibility; between what has happened and what can no longer happen.

This way of working began with my grandmother, Nang. She taught me how to draw and how to garden. More importantly, she taught me how to pay attention. Together we spent countless hours looking at plants, tracing seasonal changes, and imagining landscapes into being. Gardening became my first understanding of time: a practice in which care and loss, growth and decay, are never opposites but companions.

Before her death in 2023, Nang and I planned a small garden for a piece of land she owned. It was one of our final conversations. The garden was never planted.

Since then I have created more than 548 drawings imagining and reimagining that single site. The project, Nang’s Garden, documents a place suspended in an impossible state. Nothing dies there. Nothing grows there. Every drawing returns to a future that can no longer arrive.
What began as documentation has become something closer to pilgrimage.

Each drawing is an attempt to continue a conversation interrupted by death. Not to preserve it, but to keep it moving. I have become interested in artistic practice as a form of ongoing relation rather than resolution; a way of remaining in dialogue with uncertainty, absence and change.

Nang’s rose garden received Special Commendation in the Trinity Buoy Working Drawing Prize 2023