Open Eye Gallery has announced two new exhibitions exploring how gardens, plants and people shape one another.
Launching as part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2026, Is This a Garden? and The Perfect Flower will examine the place of gardens in everyday life, as well as the cultural and historical forces behind the plants grown in Britain.
Presented across Galleries 1 and 2, Is This a Garden? is curated by Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps and focuses on photographs in which gardens appear incidentally rather than as the main subject.
Gardens can be seen at the edges of images, behind people, through windows or embedded within domestic and industrial landscapes.
The works feature everything from birds moving through trees and cultivated plots beside industrial sites to domestic yards, patios, artificial wildlife and AI-generated plants.
Together, the photographs ask how gardens influence the people around them and how factors including class, labour, history and the environment shape the gardens themselves.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Andrew Jackson, Julian Germain, Lydia Goldblatt, Andrew Lacon, Daniel Meadows, Sarah Pickering, John Goodwin, Mark Power, Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James, Ellie Stephens, Jamie Hawksworth, Sian Davey and Sabrina Tirvengadum.
The exhibition also includes work from the Open Eye Gallery Archive, including photographs originally shown in the gallery’s 1984 exhibition Parks and Gardens.
The archive selection explores allotments, people’s relationships with plants and the social practice of giving flowers.
Curators Gary Bratchford and Stuart Whipps said:
“What interested us was not photographs of gardens so much as photographs where gardens are present in the background of everyday life.“Bringing these works together has allowed us to think about gardens as social spaces shaped by history, class, labour and personal experience, and we hope audiences find new ways of looking at these often-overlooked environments.”
Is This a Garden? has been developed in partnership with the Centre for Research in Art and Design at Birmingham City University.
Gallery 3 will host Yan Wang Preston’s The Perfect Flower, featuring photography, a projection and a short film charting the development of hydrangeas in the UK.
The project begins with a reproduction of Britain’s oldest hydrangea specimen and was developed through close observation of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Hydrangea paniculata trials.
It considers how flowers are classified, judged, valued and cultivated in pursuit of horticultural perfection.
The exhibition also examines the wider cultural and historical implications of horticulture, including the colonial histories that influenced the introduction and commercialisation of plants in Britain.
“What is a perfect flower? How do we go about getting them? Why such an impulse?” – Yan Wang Preston.
The Perfect Flower forms part of the OFFSHOOT Artist in Residence programme, a collaboration between the University of Salford Art Collection, RHS Garden Bridgewater and Open Eye Gallery.
The programme is supported using public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
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