The futuristic landscapes of Our Spectral Gardens are based on the design of a scarf that belonged to my mother. These are the patterns of my past re-made as the inside outside body-lands of climate anxiety. The shadows of animals and birds are my own hand shadows. Aloe vera leaves are pinned with cocktail sticks like collectors specimens.

The series has grown out of my research into The Ten Largest (1907), by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). I have traced the previously unknown influence of historic Swedish folk textiles within this now famous work, finding the imprint of embroidered plant designs in the paintings. These designs were created by women living in communities where vitalist ideas of life, as bound up in with all earth’s forces, continued long after they were eradicated from industrialising communities. The encoded embroideries this produced, live on in the aesthetics of af Klint’s paintings.

The idea underlies Our Spectral Gardens. The historical pattern is now a mass-produced garden design, a motif of mechanized modernity and the opposite of the hand embroidered. The scarf and its world view are what I grew up with, and its emotional resonances are a generative force in the studio, but these ghost gardens distort a now outdated vision and attempt to open space for our current fear and dreams.

My early art historical research on The Ten Largest, was published in the Tate Modern catalogue Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondriaan: Forms of Life, Tate Publications, London, 2023.

The monograph publication Galaxy Ballroom, a dance with Hilma af Klint, is published by Jap Sam Books. Launch date September 2024.