Refuge explores how gardens function as spaces of protection from the pressures of the outside world. The idea developed from Monty Dons’, V&A Dundee podcast The Love of Gardens, describes gardens as offering “a sense of a protected space as the world feels more dangerous, feels more pressured”. This led me to explore the garden as a refuge in three ways: physical, social, and mental.

 

The first model examines physical refuge. Utilising stone from my grandmother’s garden wall and slate fallen from her roof, the structure references the primordial archetypes of shelter and enclosure. These materials illustrate how gardens physically shield the body, yet the work also acknowledges a duality: echoing Christina Rossetti’s poem “Shut Out,” the walls that provide sanctuary for some simultaneously perform an act of exclusion for others.

 

The second model examines social refuge, responding to pressures such as substance use and escapism. Found objects associated with these behaviours, collected from Dudhope Park in Dundee, are encased in resin and suspended above layers of garden leaves. This stratification posits nature as a protective barrier against societal toxicity. Supported by a mechanism referencing an animal trap, the structure symbolises the ways social pressures can entrap the individual, while the garden below provides a vital space for liberation and recovery.

 

The final model explores the interior landscape of the mind. A coral brain fossil, unearthed from the family garden, is cradled by slow-growing ivy. In this context, the ivy symbolizes endurance and the "holding" of the psyche within a secure, contained environment. Drawing on the literary analysis of Boileau and Welshman, who observe that in the works of Mrs Dalloway and The Country Life, “for Woolf and Cusk the garden functions as a contained space through which to work through problematic emotions and achieve at least temporary reconciliation between the past and present.”