Perpetual Garden / Maddison Colvin
Perpetual Garden
Hardcover, 6” x 8”, 250 pages
Photographs, scans, paintings, drawings, and an essay by Maddison Colvin.
This book captures time and transience in the garden via text and image. Flowers silently bloom in the night, rushing towards death. Plants transubstantiate, are torn out, emerge anew, writhe with insects. A garden wall keeps in a scent, keeps out a lover. Seeds travel continents on the soles of boots, in Hatshepsut’s barques, and in the pockets of priests and profiteers. Suffragettes smash orchid houses at Kew and a housewife feels herself unraveling at the sight of a garden catalog. In the desert of Utah, the author plants sunflowers while the mountain above her burns.
Maddison Colvin is a visual artist whose practice ranges from painting, drawing and photography to text and digital media. Her most recent bodies of work have used domesticated plant life as a point of engagement with themes of built environment, ecology, history, and the limitations of images and archives.