Land Of Belonging

These paintings feel less like portraits of plants than records of being surrounded by them. They are the colour of how it felt to be there. Leaves run off every edge, overlap until it is hard to say which sits in front, and dissolve into the ground, so the eye keeps moving the way it does in a garden, never resting anywhere for long. Some passages are saturated and fierce, others so watery they seem about to disappear, then return. That is how memory works, and it is what these paintings are made of.

Gabriela Beston Edwards learned the language of plants from her mother, who kept a wild garden in the house Gaby lived in for forty-five years. Now that garden lives in the paintings, and Gaby is planting a new one on land in Cascade. The work carries grief and loss, but what you see is a refusal to stay there: light breaking through layer after layer, colour that insists on hope. Many canvases stand close to six feet tall, so in front of them you are not looking at a garden but standing inside one, held by someone else’s memory until it starts to feel like your own. Gaby will speak about the work at an artist talk on Saturday 5 December, 6pm – 8pm.