Gardens

Our body is our garden and our will the gardener”. –William Shakespeare “Gardens” is a Fine Art series that examines the intimate personal stories of women. This project is about the female experience, our struggles, societal expectations and our own ideals of womanhood. This series takes those ideas and beliefs and creates a garden that symbolizes each subject’s own personal story. The subjects are manipulated portraits of women turned into gardens utilizing artificial plants, flowers and makeup. The concept reflects on what this means to identity, our relationship to our own womanhood and the parallels that can be drawn between women and nature. These gardens are crafted using “florigraphy” and the Victorian era “Language of Flowers” so that each piece of the created garden has a specific meaning to each subject’s story. This creates dual layers of meaning through the symbolic use of the flora and fauna weaving the unique stories of each woman.