We are so excited to host the two-day unique and immersive exhibition ‘Into the Garden’ as part of Brighton Fringe. ‘Into the Garden’ is a collaborative exhibition from Diamonds in the Ruff (artists Anya Palamartschuk & Minnow Carty.) After visiting the Jardín Botánico de la Universidad de Valencia, both artists were individually inspired and began creating. Later down the line, they realised they were both making work about the same garden, and began creating this exhibition together. Get your tickets here.
This Brighton Fringe exhibition is a collection of drawings, film, sculptures and stories. It is a letter to the gardens in our lives.
Minnow explores the surreal, mesmerizing nature of gardens and muses about whether their inhabiting cats might be small gods. Anya creates an immersive maze of kaleidoscoping garden projections that transcends the boundaries between digital and physical space, inviting the audience to explore the garden and let their own journeys form. Their work together is a varied exploration of the strangeness and comfort of gardens and what happens in them… both in reality and in our imagination.
Come and wander through our garden, explore the worlds we have created for you and all those who live there in our surreal explosion of sound, video, storytelling and drawings all about escaping the real world, into the garden.
The Jardín Botánico de la Universidad de Valencia
The garden is enclosed within four tall walls, you can just about see buildings and the tops of trees, peeking out over them. There are parts of the garden where no trace of the city can be seen at all and the sound is so muffled that you can forget that, only a few feet away, there is a cacophony of traffic and life. The garden is intersected by a grid of wide, dusty paths. As you’re walking along, a perpendicular path might suddenly open up a view down the length of the whole garden. The garden is mostly thick with canopy, obscured by huge dense bushes, vines and cacti. So much so that you can round a corner, and be confronted by the corner of a huge glass house you had no idea was there. It is always peaceful. I can and have spent hours in there listening to audiobooks or just sorting through life’s clutter. The garden has a sensory and spatial quality that is often found in a place built for worship.
There is a privilege to having lovely space that you own and can occupy freely, there is a privilege in having lovely public spaces with access.
Anya Palamartschuk
Anya explores projection installations that tell immersive stories. By making projection mazes with multiple screens, Anya creates 3D images that combine installation and imagery to allow an observer to be fully immersed in constantly shifting, temporal 3D images. This personifies a visual self-reflective thought-process to create a conversation with a viewer.
Being in a garden has the same sense of awe and bewonderment as a church, but without the religious aspect. It feels like a heavy place, full of intrigue and stories to tell. This exhibition tells some of those stories.
Anya
Anya is a queer, multidisciplinary artist from London. The theme of layers runs through their practice: through the process of collaging different mediums, by the physical sense of creating fragmented spaces, and in a conceptual capacity, as their work explores the multifaceted nature of how we perform and navigate through spaces, deconstructing ideas around the body. The idea of a palimpsest is crucial to their work. It describes a constant process of layering and removing, adding a time element of continual change, whilst baring remnants of an earlier form. As a visual artist with a BA in Fine Art Sculpture, they employ elements of poetry, short stories, film, performance, projection, painting, drawing, sound, or collective voice in their work in order to tell stories and create a space for reflection.
Anya’s been short-listed for the New Emergence Art Prize in 2021 and received the Nagoya University Incentive Award 2019 for their projection installation entitled ‘Wander through the Shifting Lines’. They have also exhibited works at ‘Disturbance #2’ at Ugly Duck, Riposte, Lock-in Gallery, Filler Gallery, collaborated with Vivienne Griffin for ‘Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy’ Sound Workshop at Somerset House, and they have collaborated in presenting workshops at the Tate Modern and LungA Arts Festival.
To see more of their work, visit their website or instagram
Minnow Carty
I have always been interested in nature and how we live with it. Whether it's something grand built to categorise it like a botanical garden or less grand things like how water is always being plumbed around under all the pavements and buildings of cities. I like thinking about how we all construct our own reality and then spend our time bumping into everyone else's. I like the millions of silly things waiting to be found out online and places that feel so empty and peaceful you might never have to think about anything again. My work is kind of about that and kind of in this case, about a garden I really liked when I really needed it.
When my mind wasn’t wrapped up in the absurdity, fear and boredom that very much underpinned the first lockdown for me, I was thinking about being outside. I was thinking about gardens.
Minnow Carty
To see more, visit Minnow’s instagram
We are so excited to host this exhibition as part of Brighton Fringe festival. Are you are an artist looking for a place to exhibit your latest work? Be sure to hire out our studio. We can offer our help in the curation and promotion of your show. Check out our availability and enquire for more information.
